Hands-On Software Architect
Set the technical direction across the lab's products and write code on them. Architecture here is a working practice, not a document.
About the role
The lab runs several products at once across agentic systems, data pipelines and compliance workloads. They share infrastructure, they share risk, and they need someone holding the shape of the whole thing.
This is a senior role with unusual reach and no ivory tower attached. You would make the calls that are expensive to reverse, then stay in the codebase to see them through.
Responsibilities
- Own architecture across products spanning agentic systems, data pipelines and compliance workloads.
- Stay in the codebase: reviews, the hard problems, and the parts nobody volunteers for.
- Set the guardrails that let a small team move quickly without accumulating regret.
- Make the build, buy and technology calls, document the reasoning, and stay accountable for the outcome.
- Design for the compliance obligations we take on, including data residency, auditability and retention.
- Raise the level of the engineers around you through review, pairing and plain explanation.
Requirements
If you meet most of these and the rest looks learnable, apply. We would rather read your application than have you rule yourself out.
- Eight or more years building production systems, including ones you had to operate and live with afterwards.
- Depth in at least one backend language and genuine fluency across cloud, data and application architecture.
- Experience designing distributed systems and the data layer underneath them.
- A track record of technical decisions you can defend, including the ones that turned out wrong.
- The instinct to teach rather than gatekeep.
- Pragmatism ahead of purity. Small teams cannot afford architecture as performance.
Nice to have
- Experience with LLM or agent-based systems in production, not only in prototypes.
- Background in regulated data handling, GDPR programmes or financial crime systems.
- Prior work at an early-stage company where you set the foundations rather than inherited them.
- Open-source work we can read.
How you would work here
01
Craft is the point
Work is judged on whether it holds up, not on how it was presented in a status meeting. If you do careful work it will be visible here in a way it never is at scale.
02
Real ownership
You own a product surface rather than a slice of a backlog. That means the decisions are yours to make, and the consequences are yours to sit with.
03
New technology, clear guardrails
There is genuine freedom to try things, set inside limits drawn by people who have taken systems into production before. Experiment, but know where the edges are.
04
Hybrid in Amman
Three days in the office and two from home. The office days are for the work that goes better with everyone in a room, which is most of the hard parts.
How we hire
Five steps, about two weeks end to end. The work assessment is a real day of work and it is paid.
CV review
We read it properly. You hear back either way.
Call with Essa
Forty-five minutes with the founder. Your work, our work, and whether the fit is real.
Paid work assessment
One day on a realistic problem, paid at a fair rate. The closest either of us gets to trying the job.
Team session
Time with the people you would work beside, so the decision runs in both directions.
Offer
Made quickly once we are sure. About two weeks from first contact to here.
About Digital Composition Lab
DCL is a founder-led R&D software product development lab. We take on problems where software has to be trusted rather than merely shipped, and we build the products ourselves: Agentic Data Compliance for UK GDPR alignment, and Korva for financial crime prevention.
The lab is small and deliberately full-stack in the widest sense: research, product, design and engineering in one team. More about who we are.