The Call
This Senior Security Architect brief isn't struggling because of the salary. It's struggling because the brief asks for board-level reporting and strategy ownership inside an IC architect seat, at a £110,000 to £125,000 band.
The responsibilities listed in the brief are head-of-function responsibilities. The title, salary band and reporting line are individual contributor responsibilities. The candidates who can credibly do both halves are uncommon, and the ones who exist are usually already holding head-of titles at a higher band elsewhere.
Why POST made this call
The brief packages executive-level responsibilities, including board reporting, strategy ownership and stakeholder management at executive level, inside a seat that is structurally an individual contributor architect role. Senior candidates capable of those responsibilities are usually hired into head-of titles with the authority, budget and team to match. Architect-level candidates do not typically have the executive presence the responsibilities demand. The result is a candidate pool that divides into two groups, neither of which fits the seat as written.
- Exec reporting, board reporting, or executive stakeholder management
- Strategy ownership bundled into an architect seat
- Team building and management bundled with architecture
Strategy ownership listed in a seat that reports below the executive table. Strategy authored by a seat that sits two or three layers below the executive forum where engineering decisions are taken tends to be referenced after the fact rather than shaping the choices as they are made. Senior architects know this from previous seats and read the reporting line as a signal about whether their work will land. The candidates who do not read it that way are usually the candidates who have not yet learned what strategy ownership requires.
Engineering decisions sit in a function the architect does not report into. When the architect reports into security and the engineering decisions live inside engineering, the architect's standards become recommendations that engineering can accept or decline. Influence then depends entirely on individual credibility and the political relationships the architect can build. Strong candidates know how exhausting that work is in cultures without a structural seat for security architecture, and weigh it against roles where the position is built in.
Approval scope bundled with embedded design responsibilities. Approval authority and embedded design work are two organisational positions held by different people in mature functions. Combining them tends to produce a seat that engineering teams either route around or stop telling about the decisions that matter. Architects who have run both positions know they pull in opposite directions and decline briefs that conflate them.
Governance and second-line deliverables listed under an architect title. When the deliverables are policies, control mappings and risk reviews, the seat is a governance role rather than an architecture role. Senior architects who read past the title and into the deliverables tend to disengage in the first call. Senior governance practitioners who would do the work well are filtered out by the architect title in the recruiter search.
What usually happens if nothing changes
The likely trajectory if this brief goes to market as written.
Strong architects ask for Head of Security titles and the conversation stalls on grading.
Head of Security candidates read the salary band and assume the function is not taken seriously inside the organisation.
Mid-level architects engage but lack the executive presence the brief actually needs.
Time-to-fill stretches past 90 days because the pool fragments into two groups that will not meet in the middle.
Senior architects see board reporting and strategy ownership inside an individual contributor seat and read it as a head-of role priced at architect compensation.
Head of function candidates read the architect title and assume the role does not have a real seat at the executive table.
Both groups tend to disengage by round two when the organisational chart shows that neither shape has been committed to.
- Architects pushing for Head of Security or Principal titles in the first call.
- Head of Security candidates declining the compensation without entering a negotiation.
- Strong inbound from mid-level architects who can carry the design half but not the executive-room half.
What should change
Specific edits a recruiter can put to the hiring manager.
- Split the role into a head-of seat and a senior individual contributor architect seat, with separate salary bands for each.
- Or keep the role as one seat and rename it Head of Security Architecture, with the band raised to match.
- Drop strategy ownership from the individual contributor version of the role. Strategy responsibilities are difficult to execute effectively when the seat does not have the authority to influence the decisions it is expected to shape.
Rename the seat Head of Security Architecture and raise the band by approximately twenty per cent to match comparable head-of roles.
Or remove board reporting and strategy authorship from the individual contributor version of the role.
Name the senior counterpart who owns the responsibilities this seat does not.
- Ask the candidate to talk through an architecture decision they drove through an executive without formal authority over the team that implemented it.
- Probe for a strategy document they have written that an executive committee or board has actually read.
- Listen for a worked example of saying no to a delivery team at scale, and how the conversation went.
The brief picks one of three things to be: senior IC architect, lead architect with delivery responsibility, or head of security with an architect title. It defines the reporting line, the team it owns or doesn't own, and the budget authority. The salary band reflects that choice.
Supporting context
Reference material for the hiring-manager conversation.
The shape of the work the hire actually carries.
- Stakeholder management and executive influence
- Architecture pattern design and review
- Strategy authorship and roadmap
- Technical contribution
Backgrounds that tend to produce people who can do this work.
Principal security engineer with cross-team design experience
Already does the architecture work informally, usually inside the function that owns the engineering decisions. The architect title formalises an existing position rather than asking the seat to earn one from outside.
Cloud or platform staff engineer with strong security instincts
Sits inside the engineering function whose decisions the architect is meant to influence. Brings the credibility that lets standards land rather than being routed around.
Consulting security architect from a delivery-heavy practice
Has lived through influencing engineering decisions without formal authority over the teams making them. Tends to be sharper than expected on the political shape of the seat.
Domain architect (cloud, identity or data) ready to broaden
Has owned the depth in one architecture domain and is ready to take pattern responsibility across more. Brings real production scars rather than framework fluency.
Built on POST Atlas's practitioner-authored assessment framework.