Senior Technical Architect - Ministry of Justice - G7

Location

East Midlands (England), East of England, London (region), North East England, North West England, Scotland, South East England, South West England, Wales, West Midlands (England), Yorkshire and the Humber

The Role 

We’re recruiting for a Senior Technical Architect here at Justice Digital, to be part of our warm and collaborative HM Prison & Probation Service. 

This role aligns against the senior architect role from the Government Digital and Data Framework 

Our Senior Technical Architects are responsible for assuring, designing, and delivering digital services. 

You will be working with developers, Site Reliability Engineers and security experts, user researchers, product managers, designers, delivery managers, and content specialists who share a vision for improving government through smarter use of technology. You will collaborate to develop our strategy, connect people and build trust with clear communication, and provide empathetic technical leadership across diverse product teams.    

Our Senior Technical Architects will work to understand our technology, our business, and our people (colleagues, stakeholders, and users of our services), and to create an ambitious and pragmatic vision for our teams, using their technical expertise to bring our challenges and opportunities into focus alongside the views of other professions in our leadership team.     

A Senior Technical Architect can see the big picture, understanding our complex technology landscape, and can clearly and effectively communicate that big picture by building trust, developing great relationships, and empathising with others. They provide mentoring and support to other architects and engineering leadership in their service area, and they have a good understanding of a broad range of technologies, with experience in both software engineering and commercial enterprise, as well as providing effective governance, both within our organisation, and across our suppliers.   

As a Senior Technical Architect, your days will be varied. For example, you might be creating diagrams and data flows for replacing a legacy service; working directly with developers to ensure their services are robust and secure; supporting a new delivery manager to introduce or improve ways of working; or liaising with engineering leadership to develop guardrails and patterns for use across the department.  

We are looking for people who will encourage open discussion and build the architecture community within the Ministry of Justice, particularly within His Majesty's Prisons and Probation Service Digital department and Office of the CTO. You should have a mindset for growth and learning, constantly looking for emerging technologies, tools and good practice.  

We are a flexible organisation, and we understand that people can't always work 5 days a week or might have responsibilities that sometimes clash with standard office hours. We work as flexibly as we can, including offering part time hours, so if in doubt please do get in touch. If you're the right candidate we will do our best to work around you.    

To help picture your life at MoJ Justice Digital please take a look at our blog and our Digital and Technology strategy 2025 

Key Responsibilities: 

• Collaborate with the Lead Technical Architect to refine and progress technical vision for HMPPS Digital, develop our strategy and be accountable for our technology estate. 
• Communicate about our technology across teams and professions, both within our Digital unit and across all parts of the Ministry of Justice; seeing the big picture and bringing it to all stakeholders. 
• Collaborate and find agreement with senior stakeholders, providing both technical and non-technical direction and challenge, as well as pragmatic compromise to deliver value across your teams and the service area.  
• Create structured analysis of technical concepts, providing insight for multi-disciplinary decision-making, whilst seeking opportunities to collaborate and develop patterns and guidelines for the Digital Unit. 
• Guide and influence choices to align with strategy, and seek out opportunities for digital transformation, helping all understand the value of technical decisions. 
• Engage with our portfolio, assurance, risk management, cyber, and information assurance leadership to ensure priorities, such as Secure by Design, are represented alongside those of the business and other digital teams. 
• Advocate for a diverse, inclusive culture across the engineering community, growing awareness, inclusivity, and balance, including being a champion for increasing women and minorities in our workforce. 
• Mentor, coach, line-manage, and help recruit more great technical architects and engineering leadership. 

If this feels like an exciting challenge, something you are enthusiastic about, and want to join our team please read on and apply! 

Our Tech Stack 

This is our tech, both strategic and legacy. You don’t need to have experience with all of these, but we hope you see some familiar things. 

• Modern strategic software built in Java/Kotlin, Typescript and Python  
• Public GitHub repositories for our work 
• Resilient infrastructure in the cloud (primarily AWS), containerisation and Kubernetes, using infrastructure as code (IaC) and platforms as a service (PaaS)  
• Progressive software development practices such as Domain-Driven Design (DDD), test-driven development (TDD), continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) 
• A new multi-tier architecture, creating central data and business logic platforms to accelerate our product development and support our growing artificial intelligence product suite.  
• Mac laptops for delivering our work 
• Check out our tech-radar for more 

Does this sound like a role that meets your requirements? If this feels like an exciting challenge, something you are enthusiastic about, and you want to join our team please read on.

Person Specification 

Essential 

• Experience as a software engineer, cloud engineer, or software architect, delivering digital products into production environments. 
• Has practical experience across multiple layers of a modern web architecture such as user interfaces, APIs, data stores, event‑driven components, or cloud‑native infrastructure. 
• Has led or influenced technical decisions and can explain the factors they took into consideration and the outcome and impact on the organisation. 
• Strong communication skills with experience of communicating complex technical subjects to a range of audiences, from developers and engineers to senior non-technical colleagues, using clear language, diagrams or prototypes. 
• Has experience influencing stakeholders, building trust, negotiating, and persuade decision makers to achieve wider organisational goals. 
• Has identified security risks emerging when operating in a public cloud environment and designed solutions that have mitigated for those risks. 
• Has introduced or championed technical best practice within an organisation, which could include Continuous integration, continuous delivery, DevOps or Test-Driven development. 

Willingness to be assessed against  the requirements for SC clearance 

We welcome the unique contribution diverse applicants bring and do not discriminate based on culture, ethnicity, race, nationality or national origin, age, sex, gender identity or expression, religion or belief, disability status, sexual orientation, educational or social background or any other factor.   

Our values are Purpose, Humanity Openness and Together. Find out more here about how we celebrate diversity and an inclusive culture in our workplace.  

The Civil Service is committed to attract, retain and invest in talent wherever it is found. To learn more please see the Civil Service People Plan and the Civil Service D&I Strategy.