Lead Technical Architect - Government Digital Service - G7
Government Digital & Data -
Location
Manchester
About the job
Job summary
The Government Digital Service (GDS) is the digital centre of government — we are responsible for setting, leading and delivering the vision for a modern digital government.
Our priorities are to drive a modern digital government, by:
- joining up public sector services
- harnessing the power of AI for the public good
- strengthening and extending our digital and data public infrastructure
- elevating leadership and investing in talent
- funding for outcomes and procuring for growth and innovation
- committing to transparency and driving accountability
We are home to the Incubator for Artificial Intelligence (I.AI), the world-leading GOV.UK and at the forefront of coordinating the UK’s geospatial strategy and activity. We lead the Government Digital and Data function and champion the work of digital teams across government.
We’re part of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) and employ more than 1,000 people all over the UK, with hubs in Manchester, London and Bristol.
The Government Digital Service is where talent translates into impact. From your first day, you’ll be working with some of the world’s most highly-skilled digital professionals, all contributing their knowledge to make change on a national scale.
Join us for rewarding work that makes a difference across the UK. You'll solve some of the nation’s highest-priority digital challenges, helping millions of people access services they need
GOV.UK App
The GOV.UK App is a new channel for GOV.UK. The app combines mobile-native features with AI technologies and functionality provided by other GDS products to offer a proactive and more personalised experience of GOV.UK on your phone. The app makes it easier for citizens to interact with government and helps government offer more proactive support to citizens
This role will focus specifically on developing the GOV.UK app and its seamless integration with existing GOV.UK services and other government departments. Reporting into the Head of Architecture, you’ll work within and support the wider GOV.UK app architecture team and collaborate with peers including the Head of Mobile Engineering to deliver a user-centric, highly scalable, resilient, and performant app experience.
It is expected that this role will involve outreach to other government departments, so an ability to communicate to a wide set of stakeholders, along with the ability to manage many work streams concurrently is a must.
Job description
As a GDS Lead Technical architect, you’ll share the responsibility for the digital transformation of government. You will help design and drive the technical strategy for the area you work in while ensuring alignment with broader GDS standards and goals. You’ll hold the vision for technical architecture best practice in building resilient and reliable government services and communicate this to technical and non-technical audiences alike.
Lead Technical Architects often work across different teams and services. You’ll ensure that technical designs meet user needs and acceptance criteria, whilst conforming to time and budget constraints. You’ll thrive using agile methods and enjoy working collaboratively with departments and multidisciplinary teams. Above all, you’ll want to make government better, which may sometimes involve challenging the status quo.
As a Lead Technical Architect, you’ll:
- lead by example, be a visible leader who takes responsibility and acts as a role model
- contribute to the development and iteration of GDS architectural and engineering practices, principles and standards
- design technical services or plan system integration, selecting necessary platforms and technologies to meet project requirements and user needs
- provide technical leadership and consultancy to both internal and external development teams, ensuring designs & solutions are fit for purpose, whilst meeting time and budget restraints
- build and maintain technical roadmaps, looking ahead for future opportunities or blockers, and ensuring decisions by development teams align with the strategy
- encourage communication across multiple teams and wider organisational areas to identify strategic requirements and dependencies
- help develop services by contributing code, testing technologies and producing rapid prototypes
- advise teams on the right mix of capabilities to achieve their roadmapped goals and desired service levels
- act as a digital ambassador across government, supporting recruitment, identifying good practices for GDS to adopt and sharing experiences, e.g. through blog posts, tech talks at conferences etc
- be involved in helping recruiting technical architects and other senior technologists, where appropriate, helping sift and interview
- manage, coach and mentor more junior Technical Architects as well as others in the wider software engineering community
Person specification
We’re interested in people who have:
- experience working on digital products, specifically those involving high profile native mobile apps
- experience in AWS, especially serverless and event driven architectures
- experience delivering platforms that handle load at a national scale
- experience building services which handle sensitive user data
- a passion for technology and its delivery in building a user-centric service in an ever changing space, ensuring the right technology solutions meet outcomes for our users
- strong software development and application architecture experience, with good knowledge of cloud technologies, open source technologies, testing, and at least one programming language such as Javascript
- an understanding of how to influence, manage and challenge complex stakeholder relationships and communicate with both technical and non-technical audiences
- experience of developing and managing high performing, agile, technical teams and creating an inclusive, collaborative culture across boundaries and locations
- practical knowledge at all levels of the web stack, from front-end code down to infrastructure and networking
- a deep understanding of modern technology practices such as test-driven development (TDD), continuous integration, continuous delivery and DevOps
- a good knowledge of cloud security architecture, including threat modelling, analysis and operations
- experience developing and implementing technical strategy and standards
- experience defining and refining technical governance in multidisciplinary agile environments
If you meet a few of those criteria but think that you might not meet every last one then don’t let that stop you from submitting an application.
