Lead Technical Architect (Solutions) - DWP - 432953
Government Digital & Data -
Location
This role may be located in one of the following locations; Birmingham, Blackpool, 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, this role will be based at Benton Park View from September 2025, and then at 1 Pilgrim Place in Newcastle city centre by the end of 2027.
About the job
Job summary
Please note this role requires you to pass Security Check clearance. For further information, please see 'Selection process details'.
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, this role may be perfect for you!
We are looking for an experienced Lead Technical Architect who is confident working on data-focussed products and services in a complex digital environment.
This role is within the Data Insights and Analytics area of DWP, which is responsible for provision of the tooling and infrastructure used by data professionals across the department undertaking data activities.
There are two main areas that the role will work across: DWP Management Information (MI) and DWP Analytics.
The primary focus initially will be on the DWP MI service, which provides the strategic capability for MI reporting and visualisations across the entire Department.
The DWP has a large and growing portfolio of MI products built upon hundreds of input data sets managed via a variety of data ingestion patterns (e.g. API, file transfer, Cloud to Cloud bucket sharing), with around 20,000 users of the service, from operational managers to the Secretary of State.
DWP Analytics is an enterprise level capability to enable analytics developers in all business areas to build, test and deploy analytics code, to support real time decision making by integrating directly into citizen and agent facing services.
This is an inherently complex area, combining sensitive data handling at scale, cloud security and live service integration.
This is an exciting time to join us. You’ll shape the future and support our mission to deliver exceptional internal MI and Analytics 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.
- Work collaboratively with multiple stakeholders (engineers, policy, legal, other Digital colleagues including cross-government if necessary) to create solution designs that meet user needs for MI and Analytics across DWP.
- Manage a small team of technical architects, and the associated architecture design backlog.
- Provide expert advice to other Technical Architects to drive technology choice proposals and decisions (including MI and Analytics tooling).
- Ensure that architecture design artefacts are produced to agreed quality and timescales and presented effectively at governance forums.
- Ensure architecture best practice and reference architectures are shared across DWP Digital.
- Drive resolution of technical and data debt, to reduce the ongoing cost of DWP IT services.
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.
- Data Integration: Knowledge of integrating data from disparate sources (ERP systems, CRM systems, IoT devices, etc.), real-time data pipelines, and batch processing.
- Data Security & Compliance: Data Privacy, Disaster Recovery and Backup.
- Analytics & Reporting: Data warehousing, Data Lakes, business intelligence (BI) and analytics technologies e.g. Power BI, design patterns, tools and best practice.
If you would like to learn more about the role, please contact Caicy.sandford1@dwp.gov.uk.
Behaviours
We'll assess you against these behaviours during the selection process:
- Leadership
- Working Together
- Communicating and Influencing
Technical skills
We'll assess you against these technical skills during the selection process:
- Architecture communication (Expert)
- Architect for the whole context (Practitioner)
- Community collaboration (Practitioner)
- Making architectural decisions (Expert)
- Strategy design (Practitioner)
- Technical design throughout the life cycle (Expert)
