Senior Technical Architect (Hiring Immediately)

Senior Technical Architect Ref.3414

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Stonewall Top Employer AwardSocial Mobility Foundation AwardThe Times Top 100Disability confident leader

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Department

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IT / Information Technology

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Location(s)

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Central London

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Salary

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£77,800 – £86,400 (dependent on skills, experience and location) with an opportunity to qualify for additional allowances and a skills-related

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Job description

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Flexible Working: In addition to full-time (36 hours per week), term-time and part-time (minimum coverage of 3 days) may be accommodated. There is a possibility for flexible working, such as fitting your working hours around your individual needs (subject to core hours and business need). However, opportunities for remote working from home cannot be accommodated owing to the nature of the work required.

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About Us

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MI5 keeps the country safe from serious threats like terrorism and attempts by states to harm the UK, its people and way of life. We carry out investigations by obtaining, analysing and assessing intelligence, and then work with a range of partners, including MI6 and GCHQ to disrupt these threats. Through our protective security arm, we provide advice and guidance to government, businesses and other organisations about how to keep themselves safe. A role in MI5 means you’ll do unique and challenging work in a supportive and encouraging environment, making a real difference to UK national security.

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The Role

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Architecture and technology leadership is crucial to MI5’s ability to move at pace and deliver the strategic technology change we need to stay ahead. We need technology leaders to help set and deliver our ambitious technology strategy. We are moving into a product centred organisation and, as we evolve in this direction, we need senior technologists to help us develop our capabilities ensuring we are making the best use of recent innovations in technology as well as pushing these barriers further with our internal engineering teams. MI5 makes use of modern approaches and cloud technologies as well as on-premises platforms and long-established technologies and frameworks.

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You’ll be leading on and managing product and product group level technical architecture, delivering and prototyping of new and exciting secure, scalable and robust capabilities. You’ll also own and manage technical risk for the product groups you are accountable for and for supporting our product teams in their technical decisions and designs. You’ll be setting the strategic direction for our products and technologies and guiding decisions on the future of products, platforms or services, as well as enabling the decommissioning of legacy ones.

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Working with engineers and senior stakeholders, you’ll be ensuring alignment of vision and will act as a force multiplier to improving our speed of delivery whilst managing technical and compliance risk. You’ll also maintain coherence across the wider organisation’s product landscape to ensure our systems work well together and we are getting the best return from our capability investments. You’ll also contribute to wider organisation strategy or governance initiatives.

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Bridging the gap between technical and non-technical stakeholders, you’ll work with a range of technical specialists including engineers and product professionals as well as senior mission stakeholders to make decisions on risk and technology strategy. You’ll share our collective responsibility to keep the country safe and be keen to constantly improve yourself and others. Providing the appropriate level of support, leadership and direction where required to aid the development and growth of others, you’ll take various approaches, including coaching and mentoring. Respecting the views, experience and knowledge of others whilst also providing critical challenge to ensure the best approach is being taken and that appropriate guardrails, standards, polices and governance processes are in place through the full delivery lifecycle. Our technical architects tend to be ‘T’ shaped, that is, they maintain both breadth of technical knowledge and one or more technical specialisms in depth. These technical specialisms may include software development, data architecture, security, cloud technologies etc.

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MI5’s architecture community is a supportive and inclusive. It is responsible for designing and delivering real world architectural solutions to strategic requirements from business areas across our organisation and from our partners. Whether it’s delivering a platform to enable the analysis of data systems to track the progress of our investigations, compliance services to ensure we are operating legally or tooling to improve our developer experience, the nature of our work presents unique challenges. Due to the nature of our work, we are mainly office based. There are limited opportunities to work in a hybrid way – this is not guaranteed and dependent on business needs.

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About You

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We are looking for passionate leaders in the technology world who are excited to take the initiative, be creative, drive business change and have a technical background e.g. data science, software engineering and security engineering. You’ll demonstrate experience of leading multiple successful product deliveries using methodologies such as Agile within the full delivery lifecycle.

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You have experience of turning business problems into technical designs including designing complex solutions and evaluating the merit of different technical/commercial options and approaches. You can lead the development of technology roadmaps, with empowered product teams and ensuring their delivery meets the need of the business. Ensuring that their system architectures are robust, scalable, and secure, with appropriate system design and integration points (e.g. APIs), you can deliver a high-quality user experience.

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We also value your passion for continuous learning and good communication skills, as you collaborate, share ideas and experience, as well as your ability to produce high quality architectural artifacts to support communication.

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Training and Development

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We’re committed to developing our staff and recognise this will look different for everyone. We’ll use the Digital Data Technology (DDaT) capability framework as a compass to provide guidance and tools to support you. There’ll be opportunities to gain qualifications and pursue specialist pathways, as well as undertaking tailored training, coaching and mentoring. Individuals can also attend events such as hackathons, and will have up to 20% innovation and personal development time.

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As you develop, grow, and maintain your technical skills, you will have the opportunity to progress through DDaT pay points. You’ll need to regularly demonstrate and accredit your skills based on the framework. If you don’t maintain the required skills, you’ll be given the opportunity and support to rectify this, as you could revert to a lower level of capability and pay.

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Rewards and Benefits

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You’ll receive a starting salary of £77,800 – £86,400 (dependent on skills, experience and location) plus other benefits including:

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25 Days Annual Leave automatically rising to 30 days after 5 years' service, and an additional 10.5 days public and privilege holidays

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Opportunities to be recognised through our employee performance scheme

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Interest-free season ticket loan

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Excellent pension scheme

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Cycle to work scheme

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Facilities such as a gym, restaurant and on-site coffee bars (at some locations)

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Paid parental and adoption leave.

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We operate a capability-based pay approach for specific DDaT roles, recognising and rewarding specialist expertise. Salaries include consolidated (pensionable) and non-consolidated (non-pensionable) elements. The approach consists of three pay points per grade aligned to capability levels, allowing greater pay progression within role. As you develop, grow, and maintain your technical skills, you will have the opportunity to progress through the pay points.

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Equal Opportunities

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At MI5 diversity and inclusion are critical to our mission. To protect the UK, we need a truly diverse workforce that reflects the society we serve. This includes diversity in every sense of the word: those with different backgrounds, ages, ethnicities, gender identities, sexual orientations, ways of thinking and those with disabilities or neurodivergent conditions. We therefore welcome and encourage applications from everyone, including those from groups that are under-represented in our workforce such as women, those from an ethnic minority background, people with disabilities and those from low socio-economic backgrounds.

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Find out more about our culture, working environment and diversity on our website:

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https://www.MI5.gov.uk/careers/diversity

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We’re Disability Confident

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MI5 are proud to have achieved Leader status within the DWP’s Disability Confident scheme. This is aimed at encouraging employers to think differently about disability and take action to improve how they recruit, retain and develop disabled people. Being Disability Confident, we aim to offer a person-to-person interview to any candidate who self-identifies as disabled and meets the essential criteria for the role. This is our ‘Offer of Interview’ (OOI). To secure an interview for this vacancy, the essential criteria (in order of application process) are:

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Demonstrate a technical background in data science or software engineering or security engineering (assessed at application sift)”

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Demonstrate the ability to turn business problems into technical designs in