Overview

As a Senior Technical Architect, your main responsibilities will include:

• Defining, maintaining, and championing the technical strategy for a service or group of services — keeping up to date with the latest technologies and trends, whilst delivering working software early and often.
• Leading technical specialists in multiple projects and services on problems that require broad architectural thinking.
• Defining how to build and operate user-centred, open-source web systems in an agile environment, to serve a variety of citizen and government needs.
• Being responsible for the technical design and development of services in your programme, including how they interact with their surroundings and how they evolve over time.
• Challenging entrenched practices and influencing decision-makers, seeking deeper underlying problems to solve and larger opportunities for digital transformation.
• Communicating the vision for government services to developers and non-developers alike, working in multi-disciplinary teams that bring policy and delivery together.
• Playing an active role in the DfE architecture community, sharing knowledge of tools and techniques, and joining related communities of practice and events where appropriate (e.g., product, user research, design, platforms, security).
• Helping to build a diverse, inclusive culture across the technical architecture community.
• Working with your Lead Technical Architect, colleagues and peers on profession-based activities (and cross-profession), such as defining standards and guidance around best practice.

Please note that while there are two roles available, only one of them can be based in our Darlington office.

Role details

• Funding Service Delivery team — responsible for supporting one of the largest funding operations across government, ensuring that over £75bn of education and training funds are allocated, contracted, and paid accurately and on time. Our digital Funding Service, made up of both internal and external-facing products, underpins this critical operation. As a Technical Architect, you will help shape and modernise this service to remain scalable, secure, and efficient. You will work in a fast-paced environment, collaborating with multi-disciplinary teams to deliver high-quality digital solutions that enhance the customer experience and meet the evolving needs of the education sector.
• Children and Families digital portfolio — supporting children and young people to be safer, healthier and happier. This portfolio works with Families Group to deliver Manifesto commitments on children’s social care, early years childcare and our contribution to Government’s Mission to break down barriers to opportunity. We are pursuing significant reform programmes in early years and childcare, and in children’s social care. You will join the Senior Technical Architect role to work with policy teams to research, design and build services that help families and young people have the best start in life.

Qualifications and experience

• Experience working and coaching in technical teams and delivering user-centred services in an agile environment.
• Experience working with cloud-first architectures and building applications that take advantage of the opportunities they offer.
• Experience of software development in Ruby, .Net (or similar), and introducing modern software engineering practices, such as Test-Driven Development (TDD), continuous integration/development (CI/CD), automated deployment pipelines and Git-based DevOps.
• The ability to work with technical and non-technical stakeholders to achieve agreement on technical plans.
• The ability to look beyond immediate technical problems and identify the wider implications.
• Practical knowledge across many levels of the web stack, from front-end code to infrastructure and networking, and experience using automated tests to continuously validate your work.
• Experience of applying the UK Government Service Standard and service assessment.
• Experience of mentoring and supporting colleagues in multi-disciplinary teams, one-to-one or in groups.
• Ability to work with stakeholders to produce effective strategies for technology choices, using the most appropriate languages, frameworks and tools to meet user and business needs.