Principal Enterprise Architect - Department for Transport - G6
Government Digital & Data -
Location
Birmingham, Hastings, Leeds, London, Swansea
About the job
Job summary
Can you shape and deliver enterprise architecture strategy at scale?
Do you influence senior stakeholders to drive complex technology decisions?
If so, we’d love to hear from you!
This is an exciting time to join the Digital, Information and Security Directorate within the Department for Transport as we restructure our directorate to ensure we are ready for future challenges, building a more sustainable, skilled and in-house capability.
You will shape strategy, influence decision-making, and take ownership of the results and service impact of enterprise architecture decisions across the Department for Transport.
As a Principal Enterprise Architect, you will lead the development of enterprise architecture strategy, target-state architectures and strategic roadmaps, ensuring business and technology investments deliver measurable value. You will work closely with senior business, service, delivery, and technical stakeholders to understand and challenge needs, explain options and trade-offs, and build agreement on complex decisions. You will not operate only at a strategic distance: where work is high risk, business critical or blocked, you will get directly involved, manage architectural risks through to resolution, and remain accountable for the effect of your advice on live services, users, and business outcomes.
Joining our department comes with many benefits, including:
- Employer pension contribution of 28.97% of your salary. Read more about Civil Service Pensions here
- 25 days annual leave, increasing by 1 day each year of service (up to a maximum of 30 days annual leave), plus 8 bank holidays a privilege day for the King’s birthday
- Flexible working options where we encourage a great work-life balance.
Read more in the Benefits section below!
Find out more about what it's like working at Department for Transport Central - Department for Transport Careers and within the Government Digital and Data Profession.
Job description
Join the Department for Transport as a Principal Enterprise Architect and play a leading role in shaping the technology strategy that supports the UK's transport system.
You'll be responsible for defining and driving enterprise architecture across a complex digital landscape, ensuring technology investments, services, and capabilities align with organisational priorities and long-term objectives.
Working with senior leaders, technical specialists, and business stakeholders, you'll provide expert architectural leadership, influence strategic decision-making, and establish standards that enable secure, scalable, and innovative digital services. You'll guide the development of technology roadmaps, oversee governance and assurance activities, and ensure architectural decisions support both current and future business needs.
This is a high-impact role where you'll help shape the future direction of digital, data, and technology across the Department. You'll identify emerging trends, champion best practice, build consensus across diverse stakeholder groups, and support the successful delivery of transformational programmes. You'll also develop architectural capability across the organisation, inspiring and mentoring others, while helping to build a strong, future-ready profession. In addition, you'll actively engage with architecture communities across government, contributing to cross-government collaboration, sharing best practice, and helping to influence the wider public sector architecture profession.
If you're passionate about strategy, innovation, and leading change at scale, this is an opportunity to make a lasting impact.
Your responsibilities will include, but aren’t limited to:
- Leading the development and implementation of enterprise architecture strategy, principles, standards, patterns, and roadmaps aligned to departmental priorities and business needs.
- Taking ownership of the results and service impacts of architectural advice and decisions, including becoming directly involved in complex, high-risk or business-critical work to resolve issues and unblock delivery.
- Building trusted relationships with senior business, service, delivery and technical stakeholders; understanding and constructively challenging needs; agreeing priorities; and communicating complex options, trade-offs and decisions clearly.
- Identifying, communicating, and managing architectural risks through to resolution, balancing delivery pace with security, resilience, compliance, operational stability and value for money.
- Making clear where constraints in the technology offer limit what can be delivered, and managing the consequences for users, live services, operations, and wider business outcomes.
Person specification
To be successful in this role you will need to have the following experience:
- Enterprise architecture leadership. You have substantial experience leading enterprise architecture across business, application, data, technology and security domains, connecting organisational strategy and user outcomes to coherent target architectures and roadmaps.
- Operating model, governance and assurance. You have experience designing or evolving enterprise architecture operating models, governance structures and decision-making processes, and applying standards and reference architectures to support an integrated technology plan.
- Making and guiding decisions. You can make and guide complex, high-impact architectural decisions, build consensus across services and stakeholders, and balance delivery pace with security, resilience, compliance and operational stability.
- Ownership of outcomes and service impact. You can demonstrate where you became directly involved in complex or high-risk work, took ownership of the results of architectural decisions, and managed their impact on live services, users and business outcomes, including where technology constraints limited the available offer.
- Stakeholder engagement and risk management. You have a strong track record of building trusted relationships with senior business, service, delivery and technical stakeholders; understanding and constructively challenging business needs; and identifying, communicating and managing architectural risks through to resolution.
- Investment and commercial insight. You have experience influencing technology investments, business cases and strategic priorities through architectural evidence and governance, with a clear focus on value for money, lifecycle cost and the management of technical debt.
- Understanding the whole context. You understand digital trends, technology opportunities and cross-organisational dependencies, and can assess their implications for the department, its people, services and major transformation programmes.
- Communicating between the technical and non-technical. You can explain complex choices, options, costs, risks and trade-offs clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders, mediate difficult discussions and influence senior leaders.
- Strategy and transformation. You can define and connect strategies, standards, policies, patterns, roadmaps and vision statements, and translate them into practical architectural direction that enables cloud adoption, platform modernisation and the transition from legacy services.
- Problem definition and technical design. You can frame complex business problems, challenge assumptions and guide the design of systems characterised by high levels of risk, impact and business or technical complexity.
- Professional and capability leadership. You have experience building architecture capability through mentoring, communities of practice, standards development, workforce planning or profession leadership, creating an inclusive environment in which technical specialists can develop and succeed.
- Enterprise architecture tools. You have experience rationalising tooling and using enterprise architecture tools and modelling standards to maintain a trusted source of information that supports strategic investment, dependency management and technology lifecycle decisions.
