Technical & Security Architect - UK Export Finance - G7

Location

Westminster, London and Leeds

About the job

Job summary

The Technical & Security Architect is a key member of the EA Team and is responsible for the architecture and security of the team’s domains monitoring platform and to ensure that the .gov.uk registry provider delivers a resilient service.

The UK Public Sector depends on internet domain name spaces such as “.gov.uk”, and you will ensure these name spaces remain stable, trusted, well managed and resistant to compromise.

You will bring together your proven technical and cyber expertise with business transformation where branding, government policy and law all play a part through the creation of secure technical solution designs ensuring all our services and infrastructure are secure by design.

It is essential that you are positive, proactive and collaborative with a commitment to providing excellent customer service.

Job description

The key responsibilities and deliverables for this post are working with your UKEF colleagues and customers to ensure that UKEF is able to meet evolving customer demand using a secure, scalable and  robust enterprise architecture blueprint.

The main activities of your role will be:

• Designing secure systems - you can design and review system architectures through the development of patterns and principles.
• Security technology - you can demonstrate strong knowledge of system architectures. You can understand and articulate the impact of vulnerabilities on existing and future designs and systems, and how easy or difficult it will be to exploit these vulnerabilities. You can be recognised as an expert by peers in the broader security industry.
• Communicating between the technical and non-technical - you can identify the needs of business and technical stakeholders. You can effectively manage stakeholder expectations. You can demonstrate excellent communication skills and can manage difficult conversations or negotiations.
• Making and guiding decisions - you can make decisions characterised by managed levels of risk and complexity and recommend decisions as risk and complexity increase. You can resolve technical disputes between wider peers and indirect stakeholders, considering all views and opinions.
• Strategy - you can apply strategy, using and challenging patterns, standards, policies, roadmaps and vision statements. You can provide guidance.
• Turning business problems into secure technical designs - you can design systems characterised by high levels of risk, impact, and business or technical complexity. You can simultaneously work across multiple services or a single large or complicated service.
• Understanding the whole context - you can understand trends and practices outside your team and how these will impact your work. You can see how your work fits into the broader strategy and historical context. You can consider the patterns and interactions on a larger scale.
• The public core of the internet - you will have detailed and extensive experience of naming and numbering systems, cryptographic mechanisms, packet routing and common protocols and how the domain name system (DNS) works

You will also have detailed and extensive expertise of at least two of the following:

• managing domains for a large, distributed and federated organisation
• how domains are used to support internet services and their security
• different ways that a domain vulnerability can be exploited, and how to prevent them
• developing tools that interact with domain records
  
  

This list is not exhaustive, and you may be required to carry out additional duties according to business needs.

Person specification

Qualifications

• Relevant degree in associated Computer Science subject or equivalent demonstrable professional experience (A, I)
• Recognised architectural qualification e.g. TOGAF, BCS (A)

Knowledge

• Demonstrable knowledge of the creation of and embedding of relevant architectural policies, standards and models (A, I, P)
• Demonstrable knowledge of security frameworks, standards and regulatory requirements e.g. GDPR, PCI DSS (A, I)

Skills/Ability

• Ability to demonstrate the creation of and embedding of relevant architectural policies, standards and models. (I, P, T)
• Ability to create and deliver enterprise architectures. (A, P, I.)
• High level stakeholder relationship management. (A, I)
• Ability to provide guidance to development teams, mentor team members, foster professional growth, and create an inclusive and collaborative environment. (A, I)

Experience

• Leadership and management in an enterprise architecture function. (A, I)
• Demonstrable extensive experience in the field of technical and security architecture, covering a wide range of activities, aligning to the technology, digital and data requirements of the role; to ensure business priorities, value for money and risk are all considerations. (I, P, T)
• Experience of working across the business to ensure strategic needs are captured within the vision and roadmaps of the enterprise architecture. (A, I)
• Experience of advising and developing the future state architecture of an organisation to meet strategic needs, including a working knowledge of cloud technologies. (A, I)
• Experience of applying best practice Data Management methods, to develop data quality metrics to optimise system performance. (A, I)
• Experience of applying best in practice architectural concepts and processes, including working with relevant tooling that supports enterprise architecture development, mapping and monitoring. (A, I)

Qualifications

• Relevant degree in associated Computer Science subject or equivalent demonstrable professional experience (A, I)
• Recognised architectural qualification e.g. TOGAF, BCS (A)

Behaviours

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

• Seeing the Big Picture
• Changing and Improving
• Communicating and Influencing

Technical skills

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

• Technical questions where you will be assessed across your technical expertise and acumen, in relation to the essential criteria.
• Presentation - the topic will be agreed by UKEF and shared with the relevant candidates ahead of the interview