Principal Solution Architect - ONS - G6

Location

The ONS operates a flexible hybrid working model across the UK, with colleagues linked to one of our contractual locations working between office and remote throughout the week. The locations for this role are Newport and Titchfield (Fareham).

All colleagues are required to work from their contractually allocated site for at least 40% of their working time.

The induction process for the role will be conducted in person.

About the job

Job summary

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) is the UK’s largest producer of official statistics, covering a range of key economic, social and demographic topics.  These include measuring changes in the value of the UK economy, estimating the size, geographic distribution and characteristics of the population, and providing indicators of price inflation, employment, earnings, crime and migration.

This is an exciting opportunity to take on the role of Principal Solution Architect as the Head of Function (HoF) for the Solution Architecture community within Digital Services (DS) at ONS. 

In this leadership role, you will work closely with fellow Heads of Function across Digital Services to guide and evolve the Solution Architecture profession. Your focus will be on aligning the community with the organisation’s strategic goals and enabling the successful delivery of key objectives.

You will provide technical leadership and coordination, ensuring robust governance and assurance processes are in place and effectively implemented. As Head of Function, you will champion a culture of collaboration, knowledge sharing, and continuous professional development within the Solution Architecture community.

Our team thrives on agile principles and a strong user-centred approach. You will play a key role in embedding agile practices into our architectural frameworks, ensuring they remain responsive, iterative, and aligned with user needs.

Job description

The Principal Solution Architect - Head of Function (HoF) plays a pivotal strategic role within Digital Services at ONS. As Head of Function for the Solution Architecture community, you will lead the development and delivery of architectural vision across either a major programme, a portfolio of solution architecture initiatives, or a single, highly complex and mission-critical business domain.

You will be responsible for driving architectural coherence, ensuring alignment with organisational strategy, and enabling high-quality delivery across the enterprise.

As Principal Solution Architect, you will: 

• Lead and inspire teams of solution architects, providing mentorship and strategic direction.
• Oversee multiple architecture projects or programmes, ensuring consistency and alignment with business goals.
• Build and maintain strong relationships with senior stakeholders across diverse business and technical areas, both within ONS and with external partners.
• Identify and champion opportunities for innovation and improvement across the organisation and its partner ecosystem.
• Collaborate with technology partners to influence and inform their strategic road maps.
• Shape the future of business and digital capabilities, contributing to the overall direction of enterprise architecture.
• Foster a culture of excellence, inspiring architects to deliver solutions that meet organisational objectives.

Responsibilities 

• Develop an overarching reference architecture which considers all of the key components required to implements the ONS enterprise architecture. 
• Advocate the use of best practice, new technology or technical solutions across the organisation and to stakeholders at all levels.  
• Provide architectural leadership to co-ordinate solution architecture development across multiple projects or initiatives, assessing alignment to user needs and organisational strategy and providing direction to resolve gaps or issues.
• Develop and maintain the architecture standards and framework required to appropriately document the ONS solution architecture at both an enterprise and solution level.
• Contribute to the technical design authority to ensure solution architectures are appropriately governed, assured and implemented.
• Undertake information gathering and scene setting meetings with other government departments, evaluate architectural proposals from external suppliers, and make implementation recommendations to senior stakeholders.
• Supporting members of development teams in breaking down complex problems and identifying steps towards solutions.
• Participate in the ONS architecture community to refine and develop the ONS Architecture Playbook.
• Working with the community to develop and uphold quality and standards of the practitioners within the profession and the principles and policies of the profession. 
• Ensure appropriate architectural governance and assurance activities (inc. escalation) are agreed and actioned (for example, budget and planning). 
• Lead, work with, direct and influence the work of teams of multi-disciplinary individuals and ensure that they work together to deliver successful outcomes for both IT and the business, along with key architectural objectives.  
• Line management and staff development of Government Digital and Data Professionals within the community. 
• Stakeholder management - including engaging with external stakeholders.  

Person specification

Essential Criteria:

• Making architectural decisions (Expert) - Make and guide architectural design decisions characterised by high levels of risk and complexity, identify and address architectural risks across the organisation or wider government, lead and evolve architectural governance and assurance and present architectural governance as part of wider governance, for example, legal or commercial.
• Technical design throughout the life cycle (Expert) - Create technical designs that address needs which are high risk, could have large impact, and are of a high complexity, lead and guide others in creating technical designs that achieve organisational objectives and use feedback to optimise and refine standards for technical designs throughout the life cycle 
• Architecture communication  (Expert) - Communicate with technical and non-technical stakeholders at all levels, and across organisations, using architecture communication techniques, mediate between people in difficult architectural discussions, gain support from business and technical stakeholders for architectural initiatives with high levels of risk, impact and complexity, coach and support others in architecture communication. 
• Architect for the whole context  (Expert) - Assess how trends in society and industry practices might impact the organisation, work with people outside and inside of your organisation to inform policies, strategies and standards, anticipate changes to policy and build resilience through your architectural work and coach others in identifying important trends. 
• Commercial perspective  (Working) - Understand commercial processes and the appropriate internal contacts within a government department and understand different sourcing strategies and when to apply them. 
• Strategy design  (Expert) - Define and connect strategies or visions across the organisation or wider government, enable the implementation of strategies or visions across the organization or wider government, for example, by advocating for resources and removing blockers.

Behaviours

We'll assess you against these behaviours during the selection process:

• Communicating and Influencing
• Developing Self and Others
• Changing and Improving

Technical skills

We'll assess you against these technical skills during the selection process:

• Making architectural decisions
• Technical design throughout the lifecycle
• Architecture communication
• Architect for the whole context