Distinguished Engineer, End-to-End Security Architect

About us

Graphcore is one of the world’s leading innovators in Artificial Intelligence compute.

It is developing hardware, software and systems infrastructure that will unlock the next generation of AI breakthroughs and power the widespread adoption of AI solutions across every industry.

As part of the SoftBank Group, Graphcore is a member of an elite family of companies responsible for some of the world’s most transformative technologies. Together, they share a bold vision: to enable Artificial Super Intelligence and ensure its benefits are accessible to everyone.

Graphcore’s teams are drawn from diverse backgrounds and bring a broad range of skills and perspectives. A melting pot of AI research specialists, silicon designers, software engineers and systems architects, Graphcore fosters continuous learning and innovation.

Job Summary

Reporting into the Systems Engineering organisation, the Distinguished Engineer, End-to-End Security Architect will define and lead the security architecture for Graphcore’s inference service platform. This role is responsible for establishing a comprehensive security strategy spanning platform, infrastructure, networking, service operations, customer assurance, and compliance readiness. Working across multiple engineering and operational functions, the successful candidate will provide technical leadership, drive security requirements, and ensure the platform delivers robust protection, resilience, and trust for customers.

The Team

You will work closely with teams across security architecture, infrastructure engineering, networking, site reliability engineering, platform software, firmware, data centre operations, compliance, legal, customer engineering, and customer security. The team collaborates across the business to deliver secure, reliable, and scalable AI infrastructure and services while supporting customer assurance, regulatory requirements, and operational excellence.

Responsibilities and Duties

• Own the end-to-end security architecture for the inference service platform, covering infrastructure, networking, APIs, operational controls, monitoring, and customer assurance.
• Define security principles, threat models, trust boundaries, tenant isolation requirements, and architectural standards for the service.
• Establish security requirements for deployment environments, including physical security, operational controls, access management, and asset protection.
• Define platform security requirements across hardware, firmware, secure boot, attestation, software integrity, and lifecycle management.
• Lead the design of network and service isolation controls, secure communications, segmentation strategies, and administrative access protections.
• Own security architecture for authentication, authorisation, secrets management, encryption, key management, and data protection controls.
• Define privileged access management approaches, audit requirements, access review processes, and emergency access procedures.
• Establish logging, monitoring, telemetry, incident response, and security assurance requirements across the service lifecycle.
• Partner with engineering and operations teams to ensure security requirements are effectively implemented, maintained, and validated.
• Assess security posture against customer, contractual, regulatory, and internal requirements, managing risk-based decisions where required.
• Support customer security reviews, audits, penetration testing activities, security questionnaires, and technical assurance discussions.
• Provide technical leadership, architectural guidance, mentoring, and design review expertise across multiple teams and disciplines.

Candidate Profile

Essential

• Advanced degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Cybersecurity, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
• Significant experience in security architecture, platform security, cloud security, infrastructure security, or large-scale service security.
• Demonstrated experience defining and owning security architecture for customer-facing platforms, infrastructure services, or large-scale production environments.
• Deep understanding of threat modelling, zero-trust principles, tenant isolation, privileged access management, cryptographic controls, and secure operations.
• Strong knowledge of platform security technologies including trusted execution mechanisms, secure boot, attestation, firmware integrity, and supply-chain security concepts.
• Experience defining security requirements for data centre deployments, operational environments, and physical security controls.
• Expertise in network security architecture, segmentation, management-plane protection, secure communications, monitoring, and access control.
• Experience with key management, secrets management, certificate lifecycle management, and encryption technologies.
• Experience securing APIs, deployment pipelines, service control planes, and operational tooling.
• Strong understanding of logging, monitoring, incident response, security operations, and evidence management practices.
• Experience supporting customer security reviews, audits, penetration testing activities, and executive-level security discussions.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to influence technical and non-technical audiences.
• Proven ability to lead through influence across engineering, security, operations, compliance, and customer-facing teams.

Desirable

• Experience securing AI/ML inference platforms, model-serving infrastructure, accelerator-based systems, or confidential AI workloads.
• Experience with trusted execution environments, platform attestation technologies, secure firmware development, and workload identity solutions.
• Experience with confidential computing, secure enclaves, measured boot technologies, and remote attestation.
• Experience supporting highly regulated environments, critical infrastructure, or security-sensitive customer deployments.
• Familiarity with industry security and compliance frameworks such as SOC 2, ISO 27001, ISO 27017, ISO 27018, PCI DSS, FedRAMP, or NIST standards.
• Knowledge of hardware platform security, high-performance networking, storage security, and accelerator ecosystem technologies.
• Experience with supply-chain risk management, secure manufacturing practices, asset lifecycle controls, and secure disposal processes.
• Understanding of emerging cryptographic technologies and future security trends.
• Experience working with hyperscalers, enterprise customers, AI organisations, or managed infrastructure providers.

In addition to a comprehensive benefits package, Graphcore offers flexible working arrangements designed to support your health, wellbeing and financial future. Our benefits include medical, dental and vision coverage, Flexible Spending Accounts (FSAs), Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), disability and life insurance, a 401(k) retirement plan, commuter benefits, wellness services and an Employee Assistance Programme (EAP). We welcome people of different backgrounds and experiences and are committed to building an inclusive work environment where everyone can thrive. We offer an equal opportunity recruitment process and can provide a flexible approach to interviews. Please let us know if you require any reasonable adjustments.