Senior Technical Architects - FCDO - G7

Location

East Kilbride, London, Milton Keynes

About the job

Job summary

The Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office pursues our national interests and projects the UK’s role in the world. We promote the interests of British citizens, safeguard the UK’s security, defend our values, reduce poverty and tackle global challenges with our international partners. We employ more than 17,000 staff in 179 countries and territories, across our diplomatic and development offices worldwide, which consists of 282 officially designated Posts. Our UK-based staff work in King Charles Street, London, Abercrombie House in East Kilbride and in Milton Keynes.

Job description

These positions provide an exceptional opportunity to make a difference in one of the most exciting parts of Government.  As a Senior Technical Architect, you will assure other services and system quality, making sure the technical work fits into the broader strategy for the FCDO. You will be responsible for leading the technical design of systems and services, including detailed plans for integration. You will also explore the benefits of cross-government alignment of systems and services. You will work on multiple projects or teams on problems that require broad architectural thinking. 

As a Senior Technical Architect, you will:

• be responsible for managing the technical design of systems and services, justifying and communicating design decisions
• assure other services and system quality, ensuring the technical work fits into the broader strategy for government
• explore the benefits of cross-government alignment
• provide mentoring within teams
• provide guidance and work with other architects

You will have many opportunities to learn, deepening your technical expertise, understanding how an international organisation works and building your own personal leadership. You will have access to a great online learning platform, attend industry events and network with technology leaders in other government departments.

Roles and responsibilities

• Architect for the whole context. Align your work with the work being done by other architects and technical professionals, track emerging issues, strategies, roadmaps, patterns and technologies over time to assess opportunities and risks to your work, identify how other teams contribute to delivering outcomes through change. (Skill level: Working)
• Architecture Communication. Lead the communication of complicated, complex or risky architecture topics with technical and non-technical stakeholders, communicate with senior stakeholders across your organisation, adapt your message and communication techniques to your audience, advocate on behalf of a team to other stakeholders, manage stakeholder expectations effectively. (Skill level: Practitioner)
• Community Collaboration. Work collaboratively in a group, actively networking with others, adapt feedback to ensure it is effective and lasting, use your initiative to identify problems or issues in the team dynamic and rectify them, identify issues through Agile ‘health checks’ with the team, and help to stimulate the right responses. (Skill level: Practitioner)
• Making architectural decisions. Work with others to make architectural design decisions characterised by managed levels of risk and complexity, identify and address architectural risks relevant to your team or domain, for example, business, data, or security, engage with architectural governance and assurance to effectively manage decisions and risks, with support. (Skill level: Working)
• Strategy Design. Support the development of a strategy or vision that aligns with organisational objectives, challenge requirements and assumptions, and identify opportunities to develop strategy, support the implementation of a strategy or vision, for example, by using a roadmap or plan, use architectural principles, patterns, and constraints when appropriate. (Skill level: Working)
• Technical design throughout the life cycle. Create technical designs characterised by medium risk, impact, and complexity, maintain appropriate quality and architectural coherence of a technical design in response to change, use feedback to optimise and refine technical designs throughout the life cycle. (Skill level: Practitioner)

Candidate Engagement Call 

We will be running a Candidate Engagement Call on Tuesday 23rd September. During this call, you will have the opportunity to ask any further questions about these roles. Please do come along if of interest.

You can join the call on Tuesday 23rd September at pm BST HERE.

Person specification

You must be a British Citizen at the time of application and, if invited to interview, you will need to bring proof of identity (British Passport/Driving Licence etc.) with you.

This role requires you to attain Developed Vetting (DV) security clearance.

For more information about this process, click here. Attaining DV will require you to have been resident in the UK for five of the last ten years. At least one year of this must have been a consecutive twelve-month period. Serving overseas with HM Forces, in some other official capacity as a representative of His Majesty’s Government or having lived overseas as a result of your parents’ or partner’s Government employment counts as UK residency for the purposes of security clearances.

It is essential in your application that you provide evidence and proven examples in each of the following Minimum Criteria, the Behaviours and the Technical question as far as you are able to do so. These responses will be further developed and discussed with those candidates invited for interview.

Minimum Criteria 

• Ability to work with the design and review processes for new solution and services, evidencing the inclusion of ‘Secure by Design” in the technical designs you produce, oversee and approve.
• Experience of presenting recommendations for technologies or improvements to enhance systems to support project goals clearly to senior management, based on knowledge of IT and analysis of systems’ needs.
• Ability to champion development of architectural practice, ensuring a coherent and consistent strategy across cyber, cloud, data centre, storage, network, mobile and the user experience of infrastructure. contributing to the overall technical strategy and road map for the department in your area of expertise.
• Experience of coaching and mentoring the architectural community and engaging with development opportunities across government.
• Technical expertise in a range of technical backgrounds ranging from Cloud, M365, Azure, AWS, Networks, Telephony or Digital systems.
• Experience working with scaled agile frameworks and implementations.

Behaviours

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

• Seeing the Big Picture
• Changing and Improving

Technical skills

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

• Making architectural decisions – Working (2nd Framework)Technical Design throughout the life cycle – Practitioner
• Making architectural decisions – Working
• Technical Design throughout the life cycle - Practitioner

We only ask for evidence of these technical skills on your application form:

• Making architectural decisions – Working (2nd Framework)Technical Design throughout the life cycle – Practitioner