Design Office Software Specialist

Job Title: Design Office Software Specialist
Location: MoD Corsham
Working Model: Hybrid, 2 - 3 days onsite (further flexibility can be available)
Duration: 6 months minimum - further extensions possible till end of 2024
Daily Rate Available: up to £700 Outside IR35
Active SC Clearance is required to be shortlisted for this role

Overview

The OpNET Design Office is responsible for the coherence and assurance of the design activity for the entirety of the OpNet Platform. This role reports directly to the Design Office Lead under governance of the System Design Authority. The primary focus of this role is to create, advise and assure OpNet designs for software architecture adoption. They must be conformant with vendor best practice, MoD security enforcement and the Defence Digital architectural patterns and guidance.

Key responsibilities

Support

• Act as the point of contact for software architecture and design on behalf of the Design Office Lead.
• Interact with programme, project and engineering team leads to ensure cross team, cross technology coherence to satisfy the virtualisation requirements of the OpNet system.
• Support design vision creation, design decisions and design review as part of the end to end assurance process.
• Support to Programme and Project Stakeholder engagement and RAIDO
• Liaise with external (to NSoIT(D)) stakeholders to ensure end-to-end designs are being delivered across the wider Defence landscape.
• Liaise with team leads across the NSoIT(D) Programme and wider defence digital organisations to ensure a robust solution is delivered within Time, Cost and Performance.

Design

• Identify, create and communicate HLDs across programme teams and the Design Office
• Support the review of all high and low-level designs for coherence, technical content and quality.
• Participate in Preliminary and Critical Design Reviews with stakeholders, both presenting and challenging design decisions, requirements alignment and supportability aspects.
• Align standards, frameworks and security with overall business and technology strategy.
• Support to the design of software architecture elements to enable the system to function as part of the wider defence estate, during inception, transition and operations.

Assure

• Ensuring that standards, frameworks and security postures align with overall business and technology strategies and policies.
• Identify capability gaps in existing architectures and recommend changes or enhancements in line with Agile and continuous improvement methods.

Essential skills, qualifications, and minimum 10 years demonstrable experience in the following:

• Architecture and development of secure Software solutions with successful delivery on complex, large scale programmes utilising emerging technologies/tooling where possible.
• A deep understanding of Software Design principles and operating within a CI/CD environment, is crucial.
• Proven demonstrable experience and proficiency in designing and architecting complex systems , with a focus on software solutions.
• Detailed knowledge and understanding of JSP and over-arching HMG policy.
• Defining and documenting technical requirements and producing detailed solution architectures.
• Designing and implementing secure solutions into a delivery environment using Python, Powershell, Ansible, Jenkins, Github, BitBucket, Atlassian Suite, Netbox, and others.
• Consulting and engineering in the development and design of software best practices and implementation of solid security principles across the project to meet business goals along with customer and regulatory requirements.
• Rationalising designs & their alignment against architectural best practice.

Demonstrable experience in the following:

• In-depth understanding of TOGAF (v9 foundation certification minimum)
• Familiarity with ArchiMate and other architectural tooling
• Experience in integrating software solutions with public cloud providers like AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.
• Experience in implementing solutions using a containerised hosting environment e.g. Docker, Kubernetes, OpenShift (preference for experience delivering VMware Tanzu solutions)
• Knowledge of security best practices and compliance standards related to VMware NSX environments.
• Knowledge of CI/CD pipelines and DevOps techniques and best practise
• Ability to optimize software solutions for maximum performance and resource utilization especially in very compact and small form factor use cases at the network edge.
• An understanding of Defence Lines of Development and MOD Capability Integration.
• Comprehensive knowledge of UK Defence deployed architectures, federations with coalition partners, security enforcing gateways and modern techniques for enforcement of security principles including VPN, VDI, hardware encryption and information flow handling.
• Experience in reviewing engineering designs and enhancing solutions against business requirements and Industry Best Practices.
• Experience in delivering to a least privilege security model.