SENIOR TECHNICAL ARCHITECT | LEEDS
12-Month Contract — £650 per day, Inside IR35 — SFIA 5 — Active SC Required
THE ROLE
Most senior architect contracts in UK central government are governance seats or greenfield design on a service that does not exist yet. This one is neither. Two live benefits, paid to real claimants every week, are being migrated off a legacy platform onto a modern target service, and you own the technical design for that migration. The constraint is what makes it interesting: nothing can break while it moves. You will be designing cloud-native solutions on AWS that have to carry live statutory payments from day one, which is a very different engineering problem to building something new alongside the old thing and switching over when it is convenient.
YOU WILL
- Create the technical designs that set out how two live benefits migrate from a legacy platform onto the target service, end to end and without interruption to the service
- Develop the technical designs that deliver the key capabilities of the modernisation, covering the architecture the new service needs in order to scale
- Support the theme teams as they optimise their sub-services, working alongside them rather than handing designs over the wall
- Design across on-premise, cloud and hybrid together, covering networking, security, presentation, middleware, database and integration
- Translate business requirements into technical solutions with traceability you can demonstrate to a stakeholder who was not in the room
- Work with delivery teams across agile, waterfall and hybrid environments, from concept through to go-live
WHAT THEY ARE LOOKING FOR
- Proven design of scalable, secure and resilient solutions using AWS cloud-native services. Serverless, containers, managed services and API-led patterns. Lift-and-shift migration, virtualisation and VDI do not meet this requirement and it is the single criterion this role is decided on
- Micro-service and API-led architecture design, with a clear method for setting service boundaries
- Event-based architecture design including publish-subscribe and data streaming. Named patterns and tooling on a real engagement, not a line in a skills list
- Architecture design informed by principles, patterns, technical radars, practices and standards
- Architecture modelling techniques and tools, and the ability to represent a design so that others can build from it
- A held Technical Architect or Solution Architect title. Both are accepted. Enterprise, Infrastructure, Data, Integration and Software architecture are different disciplines and are not what this seat is buying
- Delivery inside UK central government — a department, an arm's length body or a devolved administration. This is a requirement, not a preference. Local government, NHS trusts and regulated finance do not satisfy it
- Active SC clearance on day one. This is a hard requirement. SC-eligible, SC-clearable and lapsed SC do not meet it
ADVANTAGEOUS
- Delivery on a government service carrying statutory or payment obligations
- Public cloud beyond AWS — Azure or Google Cloud also feature on the estate
- Legacy modernisation or platform migration where the outgoing system stayed live throughout
- Presenting architecture to technical governance forums and design authorities
- Experience of a multi-supplier delivery chain with a systems integrator in the middle
THE DETAILS
Location: Leeds — 2 days per week on site, 3 remote
Contract: 12 months
Rate: £650 per day, inside IR35
Level: SFIA 5
Clearance: Active SC required on day one
Start: As soon as onboarding allows