Lead Technical Architect

Location: National*

Closing Date: 4th December

Interviews: w/c 16th December

Grade: 6 

Salary (for more information, please refer to the T&Cs on the bottom):  

London: £70,303 - £87,875 (which may include an allowance of up to £17,572)

National: £66,314 - £83,700 (which may include an allowance of up to £17,386)

Working pattern: Full time, Part time, Flexible working

Contract Type: Permanent

Vacancy number: 631

*We offer a hybrid working model, allowing for a balance between remote work and time spent in your local office. Office locations can be found ON THIS MAP

The Role

We’re recruiting for Lead Technical Architects here at Justice Digital, to be part of our warm and collaborative teams within the Legal Aid Agency, assuring, designing, and delivering digital services that make a genuine difference to people’s lives.  Together we will collaborate to develop our strategy, connect people and build trust with clear communication, and provide empathetic technical leadership across diverse teams.

This role aligns against the Lead technical architect role from the Government Digital and Data Framework.

Lead Technical Architects are a new role for Legal Aid, providing inspiring and nurturing technical leadership for a whole service area, with responsibility for multiple digital products and dozens of complex systems.  Our architects are responsible for helping to create and communicate the strategy, design and agree the composition of our services, and justify and communicate decisions.

Our Lead Technical Architects will work to understand our technology, our business, and our people (colleagues, stakeholders, and users of our services), and to create an ambitious and pragmatic path for our teams, using their technical expertise to bring our challenges and opportunities into focus alongside the views of other professions in our leadership team. 

A Lead Technical Architect can see the big picture, understanding our complex technology landscape, and can clearly and effectively communicate that big picture by building trust, developing great relationships, and empathising with others. 

Architects assure their services and system quality, guiding technical choices to fit into the broader strategy for Legal Aid and the Ministry of Justice.  They provide mentoring and support to other architects and engineering leadership in their service area, and they have a good understanding of a broad range of technologies, with experience in both software engineering and commercial enterprise software.  Architects can provide effective governance, both within our organisation, and across third-parties delivering digital services.

We are a flexible organisation and we understand that people can't always work 5 days a week or might have responsibilities that sometimes clash with standard office hours. We work as flexibly as we can, including offering part time hours, so if in doubt please do get in touch. If you're the right candidate we will do our best to work around you.

To help picture your life at MoJ Justice Digital please take a look at our blog and our Digital and Technology strategy 2025

Key Responsibilities

• Collaborate with the Principal Technical Architect to create a technical vision for Legal Aid, develop our strategy, and be accountable for our technology estate as a whole.
• Communicate about our technology across teams and professions, both within our Digital unit and across all parts of Legal Aid; seeing the big picture, and bringing it to all stakeholders.
• Advocate for a diverse, inclusive culture across the engineering community, growing awareness, inclusivity, and balance, including being a champion for increasing women and minorities in our workforce.
• Collaborate and find agreement with senior stakeholders, providing both technical and non-technical direction and challenge, as well as pragmatic compromise to deliver value.
• Mentor, coach, line-manage, and recruit more great technical architects and engineering leadership, helping build a sustainable work force plan to deliver our strategy.
• Create structured analysis of technical concepts, providing insight for multi-disciplinary decision-making, whilst seeking opportunities to collaborate and reuse common components.
• Empower teams to make pragmatic and incremental change, through influence and inspiration, setting both a vision for the future and an empathetic path that people and teams will be able to follow.
• Guide and influence choices to align with strategy, and seek out opportunities for digital transformation, helping all understand the value of technical decisions.
• Engage with our portfolio, assurance, risk management, cyber, and information assurance leadership to ensure their priorities are represented alongside those of the business and other digital teams.

Our Tech Stack

• Enterprise Oracle software, including Enterprise Resource Planning (E-Business Suite), Identity Access Management (IDAM), Oracle Intelligent Advisor (OIA), Oracle Forms, and multiple PL/SQL-based bespoke services.
• Modern strategic software built in Ruby, Java, and Python 
• Public GitHub repositories for our work
• Resilient infrastructure in the cloud (primarily AWS), using infrastructure as code (IaC) and platforms as a services (PaaS) 
• Progressive software development practices such as Domain-Driven Design (DDD), test-driven development (TDD), continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD).
• Mac laptops for delivering our work

If this feels like an exciting challenge, something you are enthusiastic about, and want to join our team please read on and apply!

Benefits

• 37 hours per week and flexible working options including hybrid working, working part-time, job sharing, or working compressed hours.
• A £1k per person learning budget is in place to support all our people, with access to best in class conferences and seminars, accreditation with professional bodies, fully funded vocational programmes and e-learning platforms.
• Staff have 10% time to dedicate to develop & grow.
• Generous civil service pension based on defined benefit scheme, with employer contributions of 28.97% from April 1st 2024 (Contribution Rates).
• 25 days leave (plus bank holidays) and 1 privilege day usually taken around the Kings’ birthday. 5 additional days of leave once you have reached 5 years of service.
• Compassionate maternity, adoption, and shared parental leave policies, with up to 26 weeks leave at full pay, 13 weeks with partial pay, and 13 weeks further leave. And maternity support/paternity leave at full pay for 2 weeks, too!
• Wellbeing support including access to the Calm app.
• Bike loans up to £2500 and secure bike parking (subject to availability and location).
• Season ticket loans, childcare vouchers and eye-care vouchers.
• 5 days volunteering paid leave.
• Free membership to BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT.
• Some offices may have a subsidised onsite Gym.

Person specification

Across Justice Digital, we use a variety of technologies and are looking for people with a proven architecture background but we don’t expect anyone to be an expert in everything. If you don’t feel like you meet all of the below, we still encourage you to apply as we will proactively help you learn our technical landscape.

• Proven experience in a technical or solution architecture role, with experience in both software engineering and enterprise IT integration, acting as a recognised expert to guide, critique, and support teams. 
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to distil complex and nuanced information into clear, concise messaging at all levels, from specialist developers through to non-technical executive leadership. 
• Ability to see the “big picture” across multidisciplinary teams, the organisation as a whole, including views of other professions, and the ability to explain the big picture to all professions at all levels, ensuring mutual understanding and trust.
• Experience in building and executing strategy to reduce the risks posed by legacy services whilst simultaneously enabling delivery of new transformative, user-centred services.
• Experience in designing software architecture, including multi-tier web applications, micro services, API management, data persistence technologies, and event-driven architecture. 
• Experience in introducing and championing best practices such as agile development, domain-driven design (DDD), test-driven development (TDD), continuous integration (CI), continuous delivery (CD), and DevOps, fostering high-quality engineering culture within teams.
• Experience designing modern, cloud-first architectures, leveraging cloud capabilities to design secure, scalable, and resilient applications, while mitigating security risks in public cloud environments.
• Experience assuring services in a complex technical estate through effective risk management and technical governance, both within your own teams and across commercial engagements with third parties.
• Experience in upholding standards in security, quality, and the law, whilst meeting the needs of stakeholders and the demands of live services
• Ability to understand the current state of the technology, the organisation, and people as a whole, to make iterative, outcome-focused, and effective change towards a strategic vision.
• Understanding of how to integrate heterogeneous technologies, building new modern strategically-aligned services alongside legacy live services, whilst managing risk and continuously delivering value.

Willingness to be assessed against the requirements for BPSS clearance.

The Civil Service is committed to attract, retain and invest in talent wherever it is found. To learn more please see the Civil Service People Plan and the Civil Service D&I Strategy.

How to Apply

Candidates must submit:

• a CV which describes how you meet the requirements set out in the Person Specification above
• a cover letter which describes your suitability for the job and why you are applying.

Failure to provide both documents, which outline what is asked for in the above criteria, will result in a rejection of your application.  

In Justice Digital, we recruit using a combination of the Government Digital and Data Profession Capability and Success Profiles Frameworks. We will assess your Experience, Technical Skills and the following Behaviours during the assessment process:

• Leadership
• Communicating and Influencing
• Seeing the Big Picture
• Making Effective Decisions

A diverse panel will review your application against the Person Specification above.

Successful candidates who meet the required standard will then be invited to a 90-minute panel interview held via video conference, consisting of a 15-minute presentation by the candidate (selected candidates to be informed of topic prior to interview), a 40-minute STAR interview, and a 15-minute technical exercise, followed by 10 minutes for candidate questions.

Should we receive a high volume of applications, a pre-sift based on ‘Technical Experience in an agile team’ will be conducted prior to the sift.

Should you be unsuccessful in the role that you have applied for, but demonstrated the capability for a role at a lower level, we reserve the right to discuss this opportunity with you and potentially offer you the position without the need for a further application.

A reserve list may be held for a period of up to 12 months from which further appointments may be made.

Terms & Conditions

Please review our Terms & Conditions which set out how we recruit and provide further information related to the role and salary arrangements.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact recruitment@digital.justice.gov.uk