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Job Description

As a GDS Lead Technical architect, you’ll share the responsibility for the digital transformation of government. You will help design and drive the technical strategy for the area you work in while ensuring alignment with broader GDS standards and goals. You’ll hold the vision for technical architecture best practice in building resilient and reliable government services and communicate this to technical and non-technical audiences alike.

As a GDS Lead Technical architect, you’ll share the responsibility for the digital transformation of government. You will help design and drive the technical strategy for the area you work in while ensuring alignment with broader GDS standards and goals. You’ll hold the vision for technical architecture best practice in building resilient and reliable government services and communicate this to technical and non-technical audiences alike.

Lead Technical Architects often work across different teams and services. You’ll ensure that technical designs meet user needs and acceptance criteria, whilst conforming to time and budget constraints. You’ll thrive using agile methods and enjoy working collaboratively with departments and multidisciplinary teams. Above all, you’ll want to make government better, which may sometimes involve challenging the status quo.

As a Lead Technical Architect, You’ll

• lead by example, be a visible leader who takes responsibility and acts as a role model
• contribute to the development and iteration of GDS architectural and engineering practices, principles and standards
• design technical services or plan system integration, selecting necessary platforms and technologies to meet project requirements and user needs
• provide technical leadership and consultancy to both internal and external development teams, ensuring designs & solutions are fit for purpose, whilst meeting time and budget restraints
• build and maintain technical roadmaps, looking ahead for future opportunities or blockers, and ensuring decisions by development teams align with the strategy
• encourage communication across multiple teams and wider organisational areas to identify strategic requirements and dependencies

Person specification

We’re Interested In People Who Have

• experience in AWS, especially serverless and event driven architectures
• experience delivering platforms that handle load at a national scale
• experience building services which handle sensitive user data
• built platforms where the users of your product are other engineering teams
• a passion for technology and its delivery in building a user-centric service in an ever changing space, ensuring the right technology solutions meet outcomes for our users
• strong software development and application architecture experience, with good knowledge of cloud technologies, open source technologies, testing, and at least one programming language such as Javascript

Benefits

There are many benefits of working at GDS, including:

• flexible hybrid working with flexi-time and the option to work part-time or condensed hours
• a Civil Service Pension with an average employer contribution of 28.97%
• 25 days of annual leave, increasing by a day each year up to a maximum of 30 days
• an extra day off for the King’s birthday
• an in-year bonus scheme to recognise high performance
• career progression and coaching, including a training budget for personal development
• paid volunteering leave
• a focus on wellbeing with access to an employee assistance programme
• job satisfaction from making government services easier to use and more inclusive for people across the UK
• advances on pay, including for travel season tickets
• death in service benefits
• cycle to work scheme and facilities
• access to an employee discounts scheme
• 10 learning days per year
• volunteering opportunities (5 special leave days per year)
• access to a suite of learning activities through Civil Service learning

Office attendance

The Department operates a discretionary hybrid working policy, which provides for a combination of working hours from your place of work and from your home in the UK. The current expectation for staff is to attend the office or non-home based location for 40-60% of the time over the accounting period.

Selection process details

The Selection Process For This Role Consists Of

• A simple application screening process. We ask for a CV and two role specific questions
• a 30 minute phone screen where you will be asked a few role-related questions to enable us to get to know you better (may not be required depending on the volume of applications)
• a 1.5 hour face-to-face interview including a presentation/interactive white board exercise (conducted over video conferencing)

Artificial Intelligence can be a useful tool to support your application, however, all examples and statements provided must be truthful, factually accurate and taken directly from your own experience.

Sponsorship

DSIT cannot offer Visa sponsorship to candidates through this campaign. DSIT holds a Visa sponsorship licence but this can only be used for certain roles and this campaign does not qualify.