Lead Cyber Security Architect in Birmingham

The Department for Business and Trade (DBT) has a clear mission – to grow the economy. Our role is to help businesses invest, grow and export to create jobs and opportunities right across the country. We do this in three ways:

• We help to build a strong, competitive business environment, where consumers are protected and companies rewarded for treating their employees properly.
• We open international markets and ensure resilient supply chains through Free Trade Agreements, trade facilitation and multilateral agreements.
• We work in partnership with businesses every day, providing advance, finance and deal‑making support to those looking to start up, invest, export and grow.

The Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) directorate develops and operates tools and services to support us in this mission. The team have been nominated four times in a row for “Best Public Sector Employer” at the Women in Tech awards and won the award in 2025!

In DBT, our Lead Security Architects are responsible for delivering the secure design and development of solutions within the department. They will support the Principal Security Architects and stakeholders in the security engagement for all projects, ensuring that the department's security design standards are adhered to through operational involvement. This challenging role incorporates aspects of security architecture, cyber risk management and cyber security policy.

You will collaborate with the Principal Security Architect and across DBT to identify new opportunities for exploiting emerging technologies and support the development of architectures, patterns and approaches to support their safe use in accordance with the department's risk appetites. At all times your goal is to help ensure delivery of systems that meet the desired business outcomes with security decisions and controls being proportionate to the risk appetite.

You will build effective partnerships with diverse teams across multiple locations and technologies and effectively communicate security and risk implications across technical and non-technical stakeholders. You will manage other Security Architects as we grow the team, covering critical review architecture referencing National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) guidelines and to guide and mentor others throughout DBT on all aspects of security architecture and best practice.

Main responsibilities:

• Interact with senior stakeholders across DBT.
• Reach and influence a wide range of people across larger teams and communities.
• Research and apply innovative security architecture solutions to new or existing problems and be able to justify and communicate design decisions.
• Develop vision, principles and strategy for security architects for projects or technologies.
• Work out subtle security needs.
• Understand the impact of decisions, balancing requirements and deciding between approaches.
• Produce patterns and support quality assurance.
• Support the technical design of systems and services.

Disability Confident

A Disability Confident employer will generally offer an interview to any applicant that declares they have a disability and meets the minimum criteria for the job as defined by the employer. It is important to note that in certain recruitment situations such as high-volume, seasonal and high-peak times, the employer may wish to limit the overall numbers of interviews offered to both disabled people and non-disabled people.