Solutions Architect

Key Responsibilities

• Develop, review and maintain solution and application architectures across a range of digital products and services, translating business and technical requirements into pragmatic, deliverable designs.
• Produce architecture and design artefacts at an appropriate level of detail, including application, integration, data and technology/infrastructure views.
• Review and evaluate technical proposals, solution options and designs, identifying trade-offs and providing clear recommendations to support delivery decisions.
• Work closely with engineering teams to ensure architecture is implementable and aligned with modern engineering practices, rather than simply producing architecture documentation.
• Provide architecture input throughout the product lifecycle, from early discovery and design through development, transition and operation.
• Support the design of solutions deployed within AWS, including consideration of compute, networking, storage, security, resilience, availability, observability and operational support.
• Work with engineering teams on DevOps and CI/CD approaches, helping ensure that architecture supports effective automated build, test, deployment and operation.
• Understand and contribute to Infrastructure as Code approaches, particularly Terraform, and how infrastructure design and application architecture work together.
• Define and assure non-functional requirements, including performance, availability, resilience, scalability, security, supportability and maintainability.
• Identify architectural risks, technical debt, dependencies and constraints, working with delivery teams to determine appropriate mitigation or resolution.
• Support integration between products, shared services and external systems, considering APIs, events, data flows and wider end-to-end dependencies.
• Ensure architecture decisions and rationale are appropriately captured and maintained.
• Contribute to architecture governance and assurance, helping teams navigate governance pragmatically while maintaining appropriate technical standards.
• Work collaboratively with other architects and engineering specialists to establish reusable patterns, standards and approaches across multiple products.

Essential Skills and Experience

Domain Experience

Experience of delivering architecture within one or more of the following environments is required:

• Large Government Departments
• Policing, law enforcement or Public Safety
• Large-scale, security-sensitive digital services
• Programmes involving Legacy modernisation, cloud migration or replacement of business-critical systems

Technical Experience

• Strong experience working as a Solution Architect within complex digital delivery environments associated to national policing systems.
• Good application architecture and solution design experience, ideally across multiple products or services rather than a single technology stack.
• Experience designing modern applications and services using approaches such as APIs, microservices, event-driven integration and cloud-native patterns.
• Good understanding of the relationship between application architecture, infrastructure and software engineering.
• Experience working directly with software engineers, technical leads, DevOps engineers and delivery teams.
• Ability to translate requirements and problems into clear architecture options and practical solution designs.
• Experience defining and working with non-functional requirements.
• Understanding of security, resilience, scalability, availability, observability and operational considerations within solution design.

Highly Desirable

• Strong practical knowledge of AWS architecture and infrastructure design.
• Experience designing cloud-native solutions using AWS services.
• Good understanding of DevOps, CI/CD and modern software delivery practices.
• Experience of Infrastructure as Code, particularly Terraform.
• Understanding of containerisation and orchestration technologies.
• Experience with automated testing, deployment pipelines and environment management.
• Experience of integration architecture, API management and event-driven architectures.
• Experience working with architecture modelling tools and maintaining architecture repositories.
• Knowledge of architecture frameworks, patterns and technology standards.