Lead Technical Architect - Department for Work and Pensions - G6

Location

This role may be located in one of the following locations; Blackpool, Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle or Sheffield.

Please find further information on the Corporate hub locations here.

Please note that for candidates requesting to work in Newcastle, the role will initially be based at Benton Park View. It will then move to 1 Pilgrim Place in Newcastle city centre by the end of 2027.

About the job

Job summary

Do you want to work collaboratively designing modern IT architecture for some of the largest digital transformations in Europe?  

Do you want to help support millions of our claimants by designing user-friendly digital services?  

If so, these roles may be perfect for you!  

We are looking for experienced Lead Technical Architects with a specialism in Contact Centres who are confident working on products and services in a complex digital environment, where you’ll be supporting major initiatives within DWP Digital. 

You will collaborate with colleagues and stakeholders across DWP Digital to support the delivery of solutions, creating options and recommendations, and providing expert advice to drive technology choices. 

The roles will include the design, oversight and architecture governance of IT solutions that support DWP customers. 

The Digital Channels Team has an opportunity for a Contact Centre Architect to lead the architecture design for its Digital Channels Contact Centre (DC3). 

This role will play a key part in transitioning from a traditional voice only “call centre” to a leading multi-channel “contact centre”, with the ultimate intention of providing an omni-channel environment. You will be suited to this role if you have experience in NiCE CXOne contact centre technologies.  As well as the underlying Contact Centre technology the role is wide ranging encompassing IVR, moving to a more “conversational” style IVR, voice recording, WFM / WFO, and integrations to existing DWP systems as well as new platforms as they come on line. 

This is an exciting time to join us. You’ll shape the future and support our mission to deliver exceptional products and services that work for everyone. 

Job description

A Lead Technical Architect (Solutions) leads at the highest level and is responsible for making sure the strategy is agreed and followed. 

At this role level, you will: 

• Network and communicate with senior stakeholders across organisations.
• Proactively seek opportunities for digital transformation. 
• Support multiple teams, finding and using best practice and emerging technologies. 
• Inspire other architects and help them understand how to deliver the goals of the organisation. 
• Be responsible for governance, solving complex and high risk issues or delivering architecture design. 

Person specification

When giving details in your employment history and personal statement you should highlight your experience in line with essential criteria below:

• Architecture design across on-prem, cloud and hybrid environments involving networking, security, presentation, middleware, database, and integration aspects. 
• Architecture design informed through use of principles, patterns, technical radars, practices and standards. 
• Architecture design working with project delivery teams within agile, waterfall and hybrid environments throughout the lifecycle - from concept to go-live. 
• Translating business requirements into technical solutions with traceability that can be demonstrated to stakeholders. 
• Contact Centre platforms offering multi-channel support, cross channel-integration, and customer interaction services such as DTMF and natural language IVR, TTS and STT, web chat and asymmetric chat, virtual agents, and co-browsing.
• Contact Centre Solution Architecture: Creating end-to-end solution designs, including call routing, customer journey mapping, and agent workflow optimization. Capacity planning for scalable, high- availability contact centre environments.
• Telephony Systems and Contact Centre Platforms: Contact centre solutions e.g. Cisco, Avaya, Genesys, Amazon Connect, or NiCE CXOne. Knowledge of Voice over IP (VoIP) systems, and IVR (Interactive Voice Response) design. Expertise in computer Technology Integration (CTI) technologies and Automatic Call Distributors (ACD).
• AI and Automation: Familiarity with AI-driven automation, chatbots, Natural Language Processing (NLP), and speech analytics, transcription and real time agent assistance. Implementing workforce optimisation (WFO) and workforce management (WFM) tools. Designing and Implementing directed, free speech and conversational IVRs with static and dynamic prompts and flows.

If you would like to learn more about the role, please contact Mark.Harbottle@dwp.gov.uk