Senior Solutions Architect in London

This role is available across our London, Bristol and Manchester locations.

Spend Assurance Team

The Spend Assurance team leads the assurance of digital delivery plans across central government, ensuring compliance with government digital policy and enabling better decision‑making through insights and support. The service focuses on:

• Supporting the Chief Secretary to the Treasury (CST) to make well‑informed decisions on digital delivery by providing access to digital expertise through integrated assurance.
• Working with departmental assurance colleagues to improve their approaches, enabling faster delivery while managing risk effectively.
• Acting as a critical friend to digital teams, offering independent challenge to avoid groupthink and blind spots.
• Maintaining a strategic understanding of delivery across organisations to support more effective performance conversations in Digital Business Reviews (DBRs).
• Generating and sharing insights from delivery activity across government.
• Connecting teams undertaking similar work to spread knowledge and lessons.
• Signposting delivery teams to the support and interventions they need to solve problems.

We assess digital delivery plans through four lenses:

• Alignment with strategic objectives: understanding how initiatives contribute to organisational and cross‑government strategies, identifying tensions and trade‑offs, and helping decision‑makers strike the right balance.
• Alignment with standards: understanding how standards and the Technology Code of Practice apply, and where trade‑offs may be necessary to support successful delivery while continuing to meet legal requirements.
• Avoiding duplication: identifying opportunities to reuse existing capability, components, patterns or knowledge to accelerate delivery, while managing the risks created by dependencies.
• Meeting outcomes: understanding the intended change or result beyond outputs and assessing whether delivery plans provide a credible route to realising those outcomes early and incrementally.

The Role

The Senior Solutions Architect will lead technical assurance of Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) delivery and spend across several central government organisations, acting as a trusted adviser to internal assurance functions, service owners, programme and project leaders. You will advise senior leaders across DSIT and HMT, alongside the Government Commercial Function (GCF), and the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority (NISTA), supporting oversight of DDaT delivery, procurement and spending plans and helping build confidence that they are technically sound, deliverable, aligned to strategic objectives, and represent value for money.

A key aspect of the role is providing credible technical leadership across a complex portfolio of major programmes. You will engage confidently with senior technical and delivery stakeholders, shaping discussions on architecture, delivery approaches, and technical risk, and providing robust, evidence‑based advice to support decision‑making. You will also contribute to the continuous improvement of the cross‑government DDaT assurance service, helping develop its approaches, tools and standards.

The UK's national security depends on advanced digital and data capabilities to meet evolving threats and increasing technological complexity. Depending on your work experience (including already holding the right level of security clearance, or a willingness and ability to successfully undertake vetting at joining) you may have an opportunity to assure digital delivery within the national security space.

Person Specification

We understand that every person will bring something different to the role and expect you to demonstrate the following skills:

• Making and guiding architectural design decisions of medium risk and complexity, identifying and addressing architectural risks that affect multiple teams or domains, and using and contributing to architectural governance and assurance to manage technical risks at the appropriate level.
• Framing problems of medium complexity, complication or risk so that solutions can be created, and describing options for solving them so that appropriate delivery methods can be decided.
• Leading the communication of complicated, complex or risky architecture topics with technical and non‑technical stakeholders, communicating with senior stakeholders across the organisation, adapting your message to your audience, and advocating on behalf of a team.
• Aligning your work with other architects and technical professionals, tracking emerging issues, strategies, roadmaps, patterns and technologies to assess opportunities and risks, and identifying how other teams contribute to delivering outcomes through change.
• Understanding commercial processes and the appropriate internal contacts within a government department, and understanding different sourcing strategies and when to apply them.
• Negotiating with and influencing stakeholders and managing relationships effectively, influencing decisions and removing blockers in challenging situations, and building long‑term strategic relationships that support mutual needs and commitments while focusing on user needs.