Principal Technical Architect

Overview of Job

The Principal Technical Architect will lead a small team of Technical Architects working across multiple projects or teams on problems that require broad architectural thinking. They will provide leadership in establishing UK Health Security Agency’s approach to Technical Architecture and guide projects in using principles, standards and tooling to deliver new systems and services for citizens.

As Principal Technical Architect, you will provide assurance for architectural designs across the agency, making sure that technical designs fit into the broader strategy for the agency and wider government. You will be responsible for leading the production of technical designs in-line with appropriate government standards including the service standard and the technology code of practice. You will also explore the benefits of cross-government alignment of systems and services.

You will support the delivery of the UKHSA Technology Strategy, and feed into sub-strategies including our Integration and Platform strategies. You will be responsible for producing designs through a defined governance structure, leading the identification of best practice, and promoting the use of reusable patterns and standards. You will build effective partnerships with diverse teams across multiple locations and technologies and provide mentoring and leadership to other architects.

Main Duties of the Job

Your main day to day activities will be:

• Leading a small, specialist team of Technical Architects

• Creating technical designs and identifying appropriate technical solutions aligned to user needs and UKHSA/government standards.

• Working closely with product managers, business analysts, delivery managers and others as part of cross-functional agile delivery teams

• Overseeing or leading the technical evaluation of proposals from third party suppliers, as part of UKHSA’s procurement processes

• Working closely with external suppliers to ensure that their architectures are robust, scalable, open and secure and meet other internal standards

• Ensuring that new products and services are 'secure by design’

• Working with and across other areas of DDaT and the business to develop and document technical designs for the integration and implementation of any solution

• Presenting and championing recommendations to senior stakeholders across the agency, communicating complicated technical concepts concisely to non-technical users.

• Anticipating and advising on future technology that presents opportunities for the organisation

• Managing, coaching and mentoring other Technical Architects and members of the wider technology team

• Forging close working relationships across other government and health Technical Architecture communities, exploring the benefits of cross-government alignment

We pride ourselves as being an employer of choice, where Everyone Matters promoting equality opportunity to actively encourage applications from everyone, including groups currently underrepresented in our workforce.

UKHSA ethos is to be an inclusive organisation for all our staff and stakeholders. To create, nurture and sustain an inclusive culture, where differences drive innovative solutions to meet the needs of our workforce and wider communities. We do this through celebrating and protecting differences by removing barriers and promoting equity and equality of opportunity for all.

Essential Criteria:

Please provide the experience/knowledge that is essential for the candidate to carry out the role

The following technical experience is essential to this role:

• Development and application architecture experience, with good knowledge of open-source technologies and at least one programming language
• Working with external suppliers to ensure that their system architectures are robust, scalable, open and secure, with appropriate overall system design and integration points/APIs, to deliver a high-quality user experience
• Working in dynamic fast paced agile environments, collaboratively and openly with others using continual delivery techniques and DevOps cultures
• Managing and delivering complex technology solutions within time, cost and quality targets
• Designing secure and scalable services within common public cloud platforms (particularly Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services) and related technologies (for example, elastic scaling, platform as a service and networking architecture in the cloud)
• Leading and influencing highly specialised technical teams, including steering decision making and improving how those decisions are made and technical systems are operated
• Developing or directly influencing enterprise technology strategies supported by user research, balancing technology against cost, user experience, operational/support experience and strategic goals
• Defining, owning and contributing to the technical roadmap and strategy and demonstrating a detailed knowledge of technical requirements to implement, design and manage associated technologies

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