Technical Architect

Role Summary 

As a member of the Central Government architecture capability, you design and deliver best-in-class solutions that meet the business and technical needs of our clients, ensuring technical and architectural integrity, and delivering to time, cost and quality criteria.  

The role of the Technical Architect is to ensure that the critical services delivered to our clients are delivered to the highest quality standards, leveraging expertise, experience and best practices in technical design and delivery across the project lifecycle.  

Key Responsibilities 

• Collaborate with colleagues and specialists across disciplines to ensure architectural consideration at all stages of the delivery lifecycle and that advice is appropriate to the organisation’s needs. 

• Deliver aspects of the IT Plan, ensuring alignment with business strategies and organisational goals. 

• Responsible for the overall technical design of large or complex systems.  

• Review system designs and ensures that appropriate technology methods, tools and techniques are applied effectively. Make recommendations to teams and clients and assess and manage associated risks.  

• Specify and design large or complex software applications, components and modules.   

• Provide technical guidance and governance on development and integration. 

• Evaluate large/complex requests for changes and deviations from specifications and recommends actions.  

• Undertake impact analysis on design options, make recommendations and assess and manage associated risks.   

• Specify prototypes/simulations to enable informed decision-making. 

• Evaluate complex technical designs to ensure adherence to standards and identifies corrective action.   

• Conduct periodic reviews of implemented solutions, recommending changes and improvements where necessary. 

• Ensure relevant technical strategies, policies, standards and practices (including security) are applied correctly, and that solutions adhere to applicable corporate, industry and regulatory standards. 

• Assure the quality of services and systems, ensuring technical work aligns with the broader technical and architectural strategy. 

• Apply architectural strategies and policies to enable integration across the IT landscape, ensuring compatibility of software, hardware, services and business processes. 

• Develop and apply architectural principles, policies and standards to ensure alignment with organisational goals. 

• Ensure architectural activities and risks align with relevant regulatory acts, legislation and compliance requirements. 

• Provide advice, leadership and mentoring for teams, defining standards and best practices 

• Act as pre-sales architect for bids and proposals, assisting with estimation and planning. 

• Participate in business development providing architectural input and meeting with clients to secure new business. 

• Work as part of a team to design and support development of proof of concepts and deliver client demonstrations. 

• Work as part of a team to develop architectures for industry focused sales propositions. 

• Identify and assess emerging industry trends, technologies, products, services, methods and techniques for relevance and potential value (e.g., improved cost/performance or sustainability). 

• Lead the delivery of technical innovation to benefit the organisation, based on a clear understanding of current and emerging technologies. 

• Exploit innovative products, services and approaches to deliver business needs and drive value for money through effective integration. 

• Mentor junior team members, providing feedback and support to career development. 

• Participate in development of internal architecture capability, including contributing to identification and definition of best practices, standards and ways of working. 

• Promotion of emerging technology awareness among staff and business management. 

• Support identification of training needs across internal delivery teams. 

• Maintain technical knowledge in one or more specialisms, staying current with emerging technologies and ensuring solutions exploit innovative capabilities where appropriate. 

• Participates in and can lead meetings with stakeholders.  

• Contribute to or lead governance boards and teams, delivering strategy, innovation and solutions. 

• Collaborate with and influence stakeholders throughout the system delivery lifecycle, providing expert advice and guidance. 

• Be proactive in identifying problems and translating them into non-technical descriptions that can be widely understood. 

Essential competencies 

Personal attributes:  

• Degree level education, or equivalent. 

• Able to work independently or as part of a multi-disciplinary team 

• Ability to articulate and present different points-of-views on various technologies and architecture patterns. 

• Understands and communicates industry developments, and the role and impact of technology 

• Consultancy skills, including the ability to communicate effectively with diverse stakeholders at senior levels. 

• Good interpersonal skills with the ability to guide, direct, motivate and support staff either directly or indirectly. 

• Highly customer focused, able to quickly build trust and develop customer intimacy 

• Promotes a learning and growth culture in their area of accountability. 

• Actively support and promotes the development and sharing of specialist knowledge within the organisation.  

• Solution-oriented with the imagination to identify innovative approaches to critical problems. 

• Effective time management and an ability to recognise and respond to changing priorities and requirements. 

• Good organisation skills. 

• Self-starting and self-motivated with a positive, can-do attitude.  

• Strong team-player, able to work well with others.  

Technologies, Methodologies and Frameworks:  

• End-to-end experience of Secure Software Development Lifecycle processes and methodologies. 

• Experience working with multi-disciplinary teams. 

• Extensive knowledge and experience of delivering complex technology services across one or more specialist technology and/or business domains. 

• Knowledge and experience of Agile development, tools, and methods 

• Knowledge and experience of applying best practice for handling personal data. E.g., GDPR. 

• Knowledge and experience of applying best practice for solution security. E.g., OWASP, NCSC cloud security principles. 

• Knowledge and experience of applying best practice within one or more specialist architecture domains. 

• Knowledge and experience of delivering complex technology services across one or more specialist technology and/or business domains. 

• Knowledge and experience of designing and delivering solutions based on the capabilities of public cloud providers such as Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services. 

• Knowledge and experience of DevOps and Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment tools and practices.  

• Knowledge and experience of Microservices, Webservices and associated technologies and frameworks including Rest, SOAP, JSON. 

• Knowledge and experience of Single Sign on and Authentication/Authorisation technologies such as SAML, OAuth, OpenID Connect, Active Directory, ADFS and LDAP  

• Knowledge and experience of Web Application design and delivery. 

• Knowledge of applying best practice for handling personal data. E.g., GDPR. 

• Strong understanding and practical experience of working with multi-discipline teams to deliver complex technology services. 

• Understands and communicates industry developments, and the role and impact of technology 

• Extensive experience of secure development using either Java or .NET and associated tools and frameworks.  

Desirable skills 

• Experience of working in secure customer environments 

• Active SC clearance, or ability to successfully undertake clearance 

• Experience working in the UK Central Government or Defence sectors. 

• Industry recognised Technical Qualifications. E.g., Microsoft certifications, Amazon certifications and similar. 

• Knowledge and experience of data architecture and associated patterns and technologies. 

• Knowledge and experience of delivering AI-based solutions 

• Knowledge and experience of delivering real time data integration e.g., streaming (IoT) and APIs.