Technical Architect Job Description
Technical Architect
Grade: A
The role
As a technical architect, you’ll share the responsibility for the digital transformation of government.
You’ll have a vision for government services and communicate this to developers and non-developers alike.
You’ll ensure a project’s overall technical design meets 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.
Main responsibilities
As a technical architect, you’ll:
●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 infrastructure is 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 development teams to identify strategic requirements and dependencies
●help develop services by contributing code, testing technologies and producing rapid prototypes
●be involved in the wider web development community, identifying good practices to adopt and sharing your experiences, eg through blog posts, tech talks at conferences
●enable a positive technical culture, applying agile methods to development and completing quality assurance practices
●mentor developers, setting standards and ensuring delivery targets are met
●advise product managers on the estimated effort and technical implications of current user stories, as well as those in the backlog
●form relationships with external suppliers
●help enable the reuse of patterns, tools, and components across the whole government service landscape
Skills and experience
It’s essential that you have:
●experience leading technical teams and delivering user-focused services
●strong software development and application architecture experience, with good knowledge of open source technologies, testing and at least one programming language
●ability to adapt quickly to new technologies
●experience scaling online services
●awareness of emerging security issues
●ability to read and understand solution design documentation
●understanding of how to prioritise work in a fast, customer-centric environment
●understanding of agile environments, continual delivery techniques and dev-ops cultures
●understanding of how to influence senior management and communicate with both technical and non-technical audiences
It is desirable that you have:
●a view of technology as an enabler of great digital services
●an eagerness to influence how digital services are delivered, both at GDS and across government
●an awareness of how to budget in an on-demand environment and an understanding of legal implications
●experience of cloud technologies, enterprise integration tools and extract, transformation and load (ETL) tools
●experience designing and implementing secure systems
●experience mentoring technical staff and managing stakeholders
●experience working in a dynamic organisation with rapidly expanding users and changing requirements
●interest in forming government best practices, standards and policies
●experience initiating projects, participating in workshops to gather user needs and building prototypes
●a willingness to travel to client locations
Civil Service Competencies
In the Civil Service we use our Competency Framework to outline expected behaviours and we will use these as part of our wider assessment during the interview process.
For this role, the following competencies are the most relevant:
●Leading and communicating
●Delivering at pace
●Collaborating and partnering