Lead Enterprise Architect in Leeds

Pay up to £99,836, plus 28.97% employer pension contributions, hybrid working, flexible hours, and great work life balance. Join us and shape how one of the UK's largest digital organisations connects, scales and secures the technology that underpins services for millions of citizens.

As a Lead Enterprise Architect, you'll join DWP Digital's Enterprise Architecture community - a team that designs the strategic technology direction for our entire organisation. You'll lead the development of DWP's reference architectures and digital blueprints, ensuring our systems evolve in a secure, modern and sustainable way. Your work will influence multi-billion-pound services, helping us manage technical risk, reduce complexity and drive transformation across a vast and critical technology estate. This is a high-impact, highly visible role. You'll be the recognised expert in integration architecture across DWP, shaping strategic decisions, guiding senior leaders and enabling the adoption of modern technologies. You'll balance big-picture vision with deep technical insight, helping teams across DWP and government deliver better, more resilient services.

What skills, knowledge and experience will you need?

• You understand modern and legacy integration patterns, and know how technologies like APIs, events, messaging, file transfer and cloud-based integration all fit together across a large, complex organisation.
• You have experience leading enterprise-scale architecture for major, business-critical systems - not just designing individual solutions, but shaping whole ecosystems and guiding major technology decisions.
• You're confident presenting complex topics to a wide range of audiences - senior leaders, technical teams, cross-government partners and external stakeholders.
• You have experience running architecture governance that helps organisations make consistent, informed decisions.
• You know how to create reference architectures, principles and standards, and can explain them clearly to technical peers.
• You understand both modern architectural approaches (like microservices, APIs, cloud and event-driven design) and traditional on-premise monoliths - and how to bridge between them.

Your role and responsibilities

As a Lead Enterprise Architect, you will be at the heart of shaping DWP's future technology landscape. You'll develop and maintain the DWP Enterprise Architecture, guiding how our systems evolve and ensuring teams have the patterns, standards and frameworks they need to build services confidently and consistently. This role is deeply strategic. You'll work closely with senior stakeholders and executive boards, helping them understand architectural risks, trade-offs and opportunities - ensuring our technology direction stays aligned with DWP's business strategy. You'll lead horizon scanning, keep us aware of industry, government and digital trends, and translate emerging thinking into actionable recommendations for DWP. This position will also play a central role in influencing how we integrate platforms and services across the enterprise. This isn't command-and-control: success comes from chairmanship, collaboration and the ability to bring people together behind a shared architectural vision. You'll work across teams, portfolios and programmes to unblock challenges, shape roadmaps, spark pathfinder projects as well as help technical teams adopt modern integration approaches. As the expert in this domain, you'll often represent DWP across government, contributing to cross-department initiatives and briefing senior leaders (including ministers) on specialist topics. You'll mentor other architects, support Product Delivery Unit teams, and help ensure the architectural 'jigsaw' across DWP fits together coherently. This is a role for someone who wants to originate strategy, shape technology direction at national scale, and leave a legacy that improves the way government works for years to come.

Details, wages and perks

• Location: You'll join us in one of our brilliant digital hubs in Birmingham, Blackpool, Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle or Sheffield, whichever is most convenient for you.
• Hybrid Working: We work a hybrid model - you'll spend some time working at home and some time collaborating face to face in a hub.
• Pay: We offer competitive pay of up to £99,836. That's £75,026 salary plus a Government Digital and Data Allowance of up to £24,810 subject to our assessment of your capability at interview.
• Pension: You'll get a brilliant civil service pension with employer contributions worth 28.97%.
• Holidays: A generous leave package starting at 26 days rising to 31 days over time. You can also take up to 3 extra days off a month on flexi-time. You'll also get all the usual public holidays.
• Benefits: Flexible working including flexible hours and flex-friendly policies; time off volunteering and charitable giving; bring your authentic self to work with "I Can Be Me in DWP"; discounts and savings on shopping, fun days out and more; interest-free loans to buy a bike or a season ticket; sports and social activities; professional development, coaching, mentoring and career progression opportunities.

Recognition

We have an award-winning environment and culture - DWP has been recognised in 2024 Diversity Employer of the Year, Diverse and Inclusive Leadership 2024, and more recognitions listed in the original description.

Process

We know your time is valuable so our application and selection process is just two stages: Apply: complete your application on Civil Service Jobs. There'll be full instructions when you click through. Interview: a two-stage interview online. Click APPLY for more information and to start your application.