Job Description
Senior Technical Architect
Location: National*
Closing Date: 8th February 2026
Interviews: 18th February – 26th February 2026
Grade: 7
(MoJ candidates who are on a specialist grade, will be able to retain this grade on lateral transfer)
Salary: London: £63,343- £78,225 (which may include an allowance up to £14,882)
National: £58,511- £73,450 (which may include an allowance up to £14,939)
Working pattern: full-time, part-time, flexible working
Contract Type: Permanent
Vacancy number: 14186
*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 a Senior Technical Architect here at Justice Digital, to be part of our warm and collaborative HM Prison & Probation Service.
This role aligns against the senior architect role from the Government Digital and Data Framework
Our Senior Technical Architects are responsible for assuring, designing, and delivering digital services.
You will be working with developers, Site Reliability Engineers and security experts, user researchers, product managers, designers, delivery managers, and content specialists who share a vision for improving government through smarter use of technology. You will collaborate to develop our strategy, connect people and build trust with clear communication, and provide empathetic technical leadership across diverse product teams.
Our Senior 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 vision 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 Senior 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. 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, as well as providing effective governance, both within our organisation, and across our suppliers.
As a Senior Technical Architect, your days will be varied. For example, you might be creating diagrams and data flows for replacing a legacy service; working directly with developers to ensure their services are robust and secure; supporting a new delivery manager to introduce or improve ways of working; or liaising with engineering leadership to develop guardrails and patterns for use across the department.
We are looking for people who will encourage open discussion and build the architecture community within the Ministry of Justice, particularly within His Majesty's Prisons and Probation Service Digital department and Office of the CTO. You should have a mindset for growth and learning, constantly looking for emerging technologies, tools and good practice.
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 Lead Technical Architect to refine and progress technical vision for HMPPS Digital, develop our strategy and be accountable for our technology estate.
Communicate about our technology across teams and professions, both within our Digital unit and across all parts of the Ministry of Justice; seeing the big picture and bringing it to all stakeholders.
Collaborate and find agreement with senior stakeholders, providing both technical and non-technical direction and challenge, as well as pragmatic compromise to deliver value across your teams and the service area.
Create structured analysis of technical concepts, providing insight for multi-disciplinary decision-making, whilst seeking opportunities to collaborate and develop patterns and guidelines for the Digital Unit.
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 priorities, such as Secure by Design, are represented alongside those of the business and other digital teams.
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.
Mentor, coach, line-manage, and help recruit more great technical architects and engineering leadership.
If this feels like an exciting challenge, something you are enthusiastic about, and want to join our team please read on and apply!
Our Tech Stack
This is our tech, both strategic and legacy. You don’t need to have experience with all of these, but we hope you see some familiar things.
Modern strategic software built in Java/Kotlin, Typescript and Python
Public GitHub repositories for our work
Resilient infrastructure in the cloud (primarily AWS), containerisation and Kubernetes, using infrastructure as code (IaC) and platforms as a service (PaaS)
Progressive software development practices such as Domain-Driven Design (DDD), test-driven development (TDD), continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD)
A new multi-tier architecture, creating central data and business logic platforms to accelerate our product development and support our growing artificial intelligence product suite.
Mac laptops for delivering our work
Check out our tech-radar for more
Does this sound like a role that meets your requirements? If this feels like an exciting challenge, something you are enthusiastic about, and you want to join our team please read on.
Benefits
37 hours per week and flexible working options including working from home, 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 King’s 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.
Nurturing professional and interpersonal networks including those for Carers & Childcare, Gender Equality, PROUD and SPIRIT.
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.
Some offices may have a subsidised onsite Gym.
Person Specification
Essential
Experience as a software engineer, cloud engineer, or software architect, delivering digital products into production environments.
Has practical experience across multiple layers of a modern web architecture such as user interfaces, APIs, data stores, event‑driven components, or cloud‑native infrastructure.
Has led or influenced technical decisions and can explain the factors they took into consideration and the outcome and impact on the organisation.
Strong communication skills with experience of communicating complex technical subjects to a range of audiences, from developers and engineers to senior non-technical colleagues, using clear language, diagrams or prototypes.
Has experience influencing stakeholders, building trust, negotiating, and persuade decision makers to achieve wider organisational goals.
Has identified security risks emerging when operating in a public cloud environment and designed solutions that have mitigated for those risks.
Has introduced or championed technical best practice within an organisation, which could include Continuous integration, continuous delivery, DevOps or Test-Driven development.
Willingness to be assessed against the requirements for SC clearance
We welcome the unique contribution diverse applicants bring and do not discriminate based on culture, ethnicity, race, nationality or national origin, age, sex, gender identity or expression, religion or belief, disability status, sexual orientation, educational or social background or any other factor.
Our values are Purpose, Humanity Openness and Together. Find out more here about how we celebrate diversity and an inclusive culture in our workplace.
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 and a cover letter with a maximum of 750 words, which describes how your skills and experience, meet the requirements set out in the below criteria:
Experience as a software engineer, cloud engineer, or software architect, delivering digital products into production environments. (250 words)
Has practical experience across multiple layers of a modern web architecture such as user interfaces, APIs, data stores, event‑driven components, or cloud‑native infrastructure. (250 words)
Strong communication skills with experience of communicating complex technical subjects to a range of audiences, from developers and engineers to senior non-technical colleagues, using clear language, diagrams or prototypes. (250 words)
Application Guidance
Please access the following link for guidance on how to apply and how to complete a Personal Statement
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:
Changing and Improving
Communicating and Influencing
Seeing the Big Picture
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 panel interview which will last up to 90 minutes, which will include an ‘in interview’ technical exercise, held via video conference.
Should we receive a high volume of applications, a pre-sift based on: ‘Experience as a software engineer, cloud engineer, or software architect, delivering digital products into production environments. will be conducted before the sift.
Should you be unsuccessful in the role that you have applied for but demonstrate the capability for a role at a lower level, we reserve the right to discuss this opportunity with you and offer you the position without needing a further application.
A reserve list may be held for up to 12 months, from which further appointments may be made.
Use of Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence can be a useful tool to support your application, however, all examples and statements provided must be truthful, factually accurate and taken directly from your own experience. Where plagiarism has been identified (presenting the ideas and experiences of others, or generated by artificial intelligence, as your own) applications may be withdrawn and internal candidates may be subject to disciplinary action. Please see our candidate guidance for more information on appropriate and inappropriate use.
Terms & Conditions
Please review our Terms and 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 digitalanddatarecruitment@justice.gov.uk
