About the Client
Digital Skills are working with A Specialist Consultancy supplying into Central Government.
The consultancy is supporting the design and delivery of secure, resilient and highly available digital services within a complex, regulated technology environment.
About the Role
This is an opportunity for an experienced Technical/Solution Architect to provide technical leadership across major Government digital services.
You will turn business and solution requirements into practical, implementable technical designs, with a particular focus on AWS, PKI, data architecture, integration and cyber security.
The role will suit an architect who can make pragmatic decisions, communicate effectively with senior stakeholders and engineering teams, and maintain momentum without introducing unnecessary complexity.
Responsibilities
- Own and produce detailed technical designs for cloud platform changes, digital services and service enhancements
- Translate business and solution requirements into secure, supportable and implementable architecture
- Define integration patterns, REST APIs, event flows, authentication mechanisms and infrastructure requirements
- Produce and maintain architecture artefacts, including detailed design documents, low-level designs and architecture decision records
- Act as the technical design authority for assigned projects and platform changes
- Provide architectural direction to lead engineers, developers and delivery teams
- Design highly available, resilient and scalable solutions using appropriate cloud architecture patterns
- Define data standards, schemas, lifecycle controls, lineage, provenance, quality and governance requirements
- Design authentication and authorisation controls for users and services
- Define PKI and certificate-management approaches, including certificate generation and cloud-based certificate services
- Establish logging, monitoring, protective monitoring, health-checking and audit requirements
- Define networking and infrastructure requirements, including routing, load balancing, traffic inspection and encryption
- Present designs to architecture governance and technical assurance forums
- Manage technical risks, assumptions, dependencies and architecture decisions
- Ensure architecture decisions and supporting documentation remain traceable and auditable
- Work closely with engineering teams to validate design feasibility and resolve technical blockers
- Refine technical designs using implementation feedback and operational learning
- Support DevOps and DevSecOps practices, including infrastructure as code and test automation
Desired Skills and Experience
- Strong experience designing cloud-native solutions on AWS
- Detailed knowledge of AWS services, ideally including Aurora PostgreSQL, EKS, CloudTrail, CloudWatch, Kafka, Schema Registry, S3, AWS Private CA, Certificate Manager and IAM
- Strong PKI knowledge, including certificate generation, certificate lifecycle management and secure service-to-service communication
- Experience designing data architectures and defining data standards, schemas, lineage, provenance, quality and governance controls
- Strong cyber security knowledge, including zero-trust principles, least privilege and technology risk management
- Experience working in highly regulated or security-conscious environments
- Strong knowledge of authentication and authorisation technologies and standards, including Keycloak, JWT, OIDC, RBAC and ABAC
- Experience designing secure APIs, service integrations, interface control documents and distributed systems
- Knowledge of container platforms and Kubernetes, particularly Amazon EKS
- Experience defining non-functional requirements for availability, resilience, scalability, supportability and disaster recovery
- Knowledge of API-led and event-driven architecture patterns
- Experience with logging, observability, monitoring, protective monitoring and audit solutions
- Understanding of networking and infrastructure, including routing, software-defined networking, load balancers, encryption and traffic inspection
- Knowledge of CI/CD, infrastructure as code, test automation, FinOps and DevSecOps practices
- Experience using recognised architecture modelling standards and techniques, such as ArchiMate, C4 and UML
- Familiarity with architecture and documentation tools such as Sparx Enterprise Architect, Mermaid, Gliffy and Confluence
- Experience working with delivery tooling such as Jira, Bitbucket and GitHub
- Strong stakeholder-management and presentation skills
- Ability to make and clearly communicate evidence-based architecture decisions
- Experience working within Agile product teams and supporting the delivery of complex digital services
- Ability to balance technical quality, security and governance with delivery pace
- Candidates must already hold active SC clearance
The successful Candidate
Will be expected to create detailed technical and implementation designs covering AWS, containers, APIs, security, IAM, observability, data, availability and disaster recovery.
The best candidate will be an experienced Technical Solution Architect or Technical Architect with a strong background in AWS cloud architecture and the delivery of secure digital services.
Candidates should be able to demonstrate substantial experience owning detailed technical designs and acting as a technical authority within complex delivery environments.
You will combine broad architecture expertise with depth across AWS, PKI, data and cyber security.
You will be comfortable defining APIs, integrations, authentication controls, data architectures, non-functional requirements and resilient cloud infrastructure, while providing clear technical direction to engineering teams.
The role requires someone who is pragmatic, delivery-focused and capable of resolving ambiguity before implementation begins.
You should be able to explain complex technical concepts to engineers and senior stakeholders, challenge assumptions constructively, and make practical decisions within delivery constraints.
Applicants who do not already hold active SC clearance cannot be considered.