Technical Architect

Open to SC Cleared and SC eligible candidates the Technical Architect (Oversight / Technical Owner) will act as the senior technical owner within the Version 1 delivery organisation working closely with a key customer. The role is accountable for maintaining technical integrity across the service landscape and for providing governance, assurance and informed challenge to delivery teams and suppliers. Working closely with our internal teams and our customer's technical stakeholders, service managers, project managers, architects, security teams and senior leaders, you will ensure that proposed and implemented solutions remain aligned with service objectives, architecture principles, security requirements and operational support models. - Act as the Version 1 technical owner for the service with our customer, maintaining end-to-end technical coherence across applications, cloud platforms, integrations and support services. - Provide architecture governance and technical assurance for solution designs, Statements of Work, service designs, technical roadmaps, change proposals and supplier deliverables. - Lead or support design reviews and technical governance forums, ensuring that decisions, assumptions, constraints and exceptions are clearly recorded. - Review and challenge technical proposals to ensure they are secure, resilient, maintainable, supportable and proportionate to the service need. - Make technical decisions within delegated authority and provide evidence-based recommendations to our customer where decision authority or risk ownership is retained by them. - Identify and manage technical risks, issues, assumptions and dependencies, ensuring that material concerns have clear mitigations, owners and escalation routes. - Oversee technical debt, lifecycle, obsolescence and sustainability concerns, helping shape practical roadmaps for improvement. - Provide technical oversight of suppliers and delivery teams, requiring corrective action or escalation where designs or deliverables do not meet agreed standards. - Ensure operational readiness is built into delivery, including monitoring, alerting, capacity, backup, recovery, resilience, support procedures and escalation paths. - Support service transition, onboarding, acceptance and go-live decisions by assessing technical evidence and readiness. - Work with security teams to ensure security-by-design, vulnerability management, compliance and assurance requirements are addressed. - Provide senior technical input to major incidents, complex problems and cross-supplier technical escalations where required. - Produce concise technical assurance reports, decision papers, risk assessments and governance updates for technical and senior leadership audiences. - Promote consistent architecture practices, knowledge sharing and continual improvement across the service. You will bring broad technical credibility, strong judgement and the ability to influence delivery across organisational and supplier boundaries. Essential experience includes: - Significant experience as a Technical Architect, Lead Architect, Technical Authority or Technical Owner in a complex enterprise environment. - Experience providing architecture governance and technical assurance within a managed service, multi-supplier or highly regulated environment. - Experience supporting UK Government or public sector digital services, or comparable regulated services. - Broad knowledge across cloud architecture, application architecture, integration, DevSecOps, security and live service operations. - Practical experience reviewing solution designs, non-functional requirements and operational support models. - Experience managing technical risk, architecture exceptions, dependencies and senior escalations. - Experience supporting service transition, operational readiness, service acceptance and continual improvement. - Working knowledge of AWS and Microsoft Azure architecture and operating models. - Knowledge of Government Digital Service standards, the Technology Code of Practice and NCSC cloud security principles. - Understanding of ITIL 4, SIAM principles, ISO/IEC 27001, ISO/IEC 20000-1 and OWASP practices. - Strong stakeholder management and communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical matters clearly to technical and non-technical audiences. - Ability to provide constructive challenge while building trusted relationships with customers, suppliers and delivery teams. Desirable Experience and Certifications - Experience working on SC-cleared UK Government programmes. - Experience with Jira Service Management, ServiceNow or comparable enterprise service management tooling. - Experience of multi-cloud, product-centric delivery and DevOps operating models. - AWS Certified Solutions Architect and/or Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert.