Lead Technical Architect - Disclosure & Barring Service - G7
Government Digital & Data -
Location
This role is available on a remote, hybrid, or office basis.
Initially, all DBS employees' contracts are office-based at one of our two sites (Liverpool and Darlington). Employees can apply for remote or hybrid work from day one. If approved, the arrangement will start after six months for transfers from Home Office or after completing probation for new joiners. Requests will be considered based on business needs and role requirements. Informal hybrid working arrangements are also available from day one, subject to business needs and role requirements and will be discussed further following any job offer.
About the job
Job summary
As a Lead Technical Architect operating within the solution space and owning the technology/applications domain you have an important role to support the business deliver successful outcomes.
DBS operates a complex technical and commercial environment with the challenge of aged legacy systems, hybrid hosting and multiple suppliers and is on a transformation journey over the course of the next two years to transition from these legacy services to modular, proprietary SaaS and cloud-based solutions, which includes the migration to new Case Management, CRM, Matching, Security Services e.g. SOCaaS, Document Management, Digital Evidence Management, Redaction, Bundling and other supporting technologies or services including those presented internally and externally to suppliers or citizens where data and information is at the heart of everything we do. In addition to this, the Lead Technical Architect will support the technology directorate and other Architects in keeping abreast of new emerging technologies that support this transformation, working closely with business, commercial and other counterparts across the organisation.
The Lead Technical Architect will support the Chief Architect and other Lead Architects as part this journey as well as managing change within the extant legacy systems and ensuring that the vision aligns to and facilitates the delivery of the DBS Business Strategy, deploying all necessary tools and techniques accordingly, as well as identifying and articulating technology led transformation opportunities. The Lead Technical Architect works with service, delivery teams, projects, planners and designers to take an early view of how they can identify and implement the best solutions to deliver business change and achieve Departmental objectives. This solution implementation will be aligned to the architecture vision and principles, and the Lead Technical Architect will be comfortable working within agile and waterfall methodologies as well as navigating hybrid scenarios across the two disciplines.
At this level the Technical Architect will typically lead a project strand (including parallel streams), a medium size project delivery area or the technical discipline of the development capability within an agile product and service delivery team.
Job description
The key responsibilities of the Lead Technical Architect are to:
- Provide technical leadership in a multi-team environment and using varied solution development lifecycles.
- Challenge entrenched practices
- Define clearly as-is and to-be architectures proportionate to the requirements of the team and environment.
- Be responsible for leading the technical design of systems and services, justifying and communicating design decisions
- Assure other services and system quality, ensuring the technical work fits into the broader strategy for government
- Explore the benefits of cross-government alignment where feasible
- Support the development of architectural patterns and roadmaps specific to the projects or services being worked on
- Contribute to reference architecture models and repository.
- Provide effective impact assessment of change proposals.
- Ensure projects and programmes are compliant with strategy and architecture.
- Assess and communicate the value of the project/programme architecture.
In delivering these responsibilities you will be expected to:
- Build effective relations and engagement with senior management.
- Provide or oversee the provision of effective technical advice to multiple teams ensuring that solutions adhere to accepted architectural principles.
- Articulate to a professional standard complex technical idea in clear, informative and accessible language, tailored as necessary for the intended audience.
- Utilise appropriate methods, techniques and tools for planning, organising, resourcing, directing, co-ordinating and monitoring ongoing activities.
Person specification
- Proven experience in developing and implementing technical architecture and design strategies in a multi supplier environment.
- Experience of designing, Integrating and managing scalable, secure and efficient architectures for SaaS applications
- Experience of working in large transformation programmes, specifically moving from legacy technology to leading edge solutions
- Experience across physical and cloud-based architectures and across multiple operating system platforms.
- Experience of application deployments in Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure as well as DevOps-type environments
- Experience of the creation and maintenance of secure architectures, designs and plans encompassing the securing of data at rest and in transit, access controls (RBAC) and multi-factor authentication (MFA)
- Proven ability to undertake detailed analysis of technical designs and provide the business with assurance of supplier designs and proposals.
- Capable of leading VFM challenges of technical proposals and manage technical interdependencies within a project/programme.
- Experience of supporting Architecture Teams or the Chief Architect in the delivery of the architecture vision and IT strategy.
- Experience of CI/CD pipelines and testing
Essential Experience
- Significant experience of working autonomously within or in support of an Architectural discipline
- A proven track record of using IS and IT for commercial benefit.
- Experience of using standard industry Enterprise Architecture frameworks.
- Experience of working in agile teams supporting rapid solution delivery in cloud-based environments.
- Experience of using architecture repository and architecture modeling tools to ensure the control and benefit maximization of infrastructure architecture.
- Experience of delivering secure and robust solutions, contributing effectively to all security accreditation activities.
Desirable Experience
- A good understanding of industry best practice in the use of IS/IT enabled business change.
- A sound knowledge and application of architecture in a government or regulated environment.
- Previous experience or background of working within, or on, secure UK based contracts
- Background in Agile or Hybrid development lifecycles
- Demonstrable experience of using industry standard modelling techniques e.g. ArchiMate 2.0 or EA Sparx
Other Role Requirements
- UK based for at least 5 years and able to meet the minimum criteria to apply for, or obtain Government Security Check (SC) clearance required to perform the role.
- You should also be willing to undergo Non‑Police Personnel Vetting (NPPV) Level 3, as NPPV3 clearance may be required when in post.
Desirable Qualification
- TOGAF 9/10
