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.

For candidates requesting to work in Blackpool Peel Park, please note these roles will initially be based at Blackpool Peel Park and will then move to Blackpool Fylde View by April 2027.

About the job

Job summary

Do you want 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, this roles may be perfect for you!  

We are looking for experienced Lead Technical Architects with a specialism in Application design and Artificial Intelligence (AI), who are confident working on products and services in a complex digital environment, where you’ll be supporting major initiatives within the AI & Innovation team.

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 DWP’s Corporate Innovation Unit (CIU) is leading the way on the ambitious task of implementing AI and Continuous Improvement (CI) to support and help colleagues in the corporate centre to be more creative and efficient by optimising and improving internal business processes.  By leveraging Microsoft Office 365 AI solutions, repetitive work will be made easier, freeing up colleagues to focus on higher value and more complex and interesting tasks.  There is also a focus on developing agentic solutions using Microsoft Agent Builder and Microsoft Copilot Studio, with the ultimate aim of having a library of agentic solutions that can be plugged together to perform complex end-to-end business processes.  If proved to be necessary bespoke, secure and controlled AI solutions may well be developed on commodity cloud AI managed services infrastructure, possibly leveraging Anthropic Claude Cowork.

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. 
• Architecture design through use of architecture modelling techniques and tools to devise and represent.
• AI enterprise products: Experience of assurance for enterprise AI productivity tooling. Enterprise products such as Copilot (including Agent Builder & Copilot Studio) and Claude Desktop. Best practice for using model harness such as Claude Code or Codex. Best practice for Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools within an large organisation.
• AI solution evaluation: Implement frameworks and approaches to evaluate model performance against business objectives, through the full lifecycle (including Business KPIs, Hallucination rates, Safety testing, Bias testing, Cost evaluation). Technology experience might include tools such as Promptfoo, Ragas & Langfuse.
• AI security: Governance, Compliance, Threats & mitigations : Experience of security governance and assurance for AI solutions, including data protection, privacy, model governance.

If you would like to learn more about the role, please contact Natalie.Selby1@dwp.gov.uk