Senior Technical Architect

THE ROLE

Most senior architect contracts in UK central government are governance seats or greenfield design on a service that does not exist yet. This one is neither. Two live benefits, paid to real claimants every week, are being migrated off a legacy platform onto a modern target service, and you own the technical design for that migration. The constraint is what makes it interesting: nothing can break while it moves. You will be designing cloud-native solutions on AWS that have to carry live statutory payments from day one, which is a very different engineering problem to building something new alongside the old thing and switching over when it is convenient.

YOU WILL

• Create the technical designs that set out how two live benefits migrate from a legacy platform onto the target service, end to end and without interruption to the service
• Develop the technical designs that deliver the key capabilities of the modernisation, covering the architecture the new service needs in order to scale
• Support the theme teams as they optimise their sub-services, working alongside them rather than handing designs over the wall
• Design across on-premise, cloud and hybrid together, covering networking, security, presentation, middleware, database and integration
• Translate business requirements into technical solutions with traceability you can demonstrate to a stakeholder who was not in the room
• Work with delivery teams across agile, waterfall and hybrid environments, from concept through to go-live

WHAT THEY ARE LOOKING FOR

• Proven design of scalable, secure and resilient solutions using AWS cloud-native services. Serverless, containers, managed services and API-led patterns. Lift-and-shift migration, virtualisation and VDI do not meet this requirement and it is the single criterion this role is decided on
• Micro-service and API-led architecture design, with a clear method for setting service boundaries
• Event-based architecture design including publish-subscribe and data streaming. Named patterns and tooling on a real engagement, not a line in a skills list
• Architecture design informed by principles, patterns, technical radars, practices and standards
• Architecture modelling techniques and tools, and the ability to represent a design so that others can build from it
• A held Technical Architect or Solution Architect title. Both are accepted. Enterprise, Infrastructure, Data, Integration and Software architecture are different disciplines and are not what this seat is buying
• Delivery inside UK central government — a department, an arm's length body or a devolved administration. This is a requirement, not a preference. Local government, NHS trusts and regulated finance do not satisfy it
• Active SC clearance on day one. This is a hard requirement. SC-eligible, SC-clearable and lapsed SC do not meet it

ADVANTAGEOUS

• Delivery on a government service carrying statutory or payment obligations
• Public cloud beyond AWS — Azure or Google Cloud also feature on the estate
• Legacy modernisation or platform migration where the outgoing system stayed live throughout
• Presenting architecture to technical governance forums and design authorities
• Experience of a multi-supplier delivery chain with a systems integrator in the middle

THE DETAILS

Location: Leeds — 2 days per week on site, 3 remote

Contract: 12 months

Level: SFIA 5

Clearance: Active SC required on day one