Senior Enterprise Architect - Birmingham

Discover a career in your hands at HMRC. Whether you're seeking purpose, growth, or a workplace that gives you a true sense of belonging, hear from some of our employees as they share their story about what it's really like to work at HMRC. At HMRC we are committed to creating a great place to work for all our colleagues; an inclusive and respectful environment that reflects the diversity of the society we serve. We want to maximise the potential of everyone who chooses to work for us and we offer a range of flexible working patterns and support to make a fulfilling career at HMRC. Diverse perspectives and experiences are critical to our success, and we welcome applications from people from all backgrounds with the experience and skills needed to perform this role.

HMRC is building a modern, digital tax administration, and currently runs the biggest digital operation in Government. With 50 million customers to serve, over 60 thousand colleagues to support, and £700 billion to collect to fund UK Plc, our IT operation is huge.

This is an exciting opportunity to join HMRC's Enterprise Architecture - Standards, Tools and Artefacts team, a dynamic group working across one of the largest and most complex IT estates in Europe. Our mission is to deliver an architecture strategy that underpins modern, internal-facing services and drives transformation at scale. As a Senior Enterprise Architect, you will play a pivotal role in shaping HMRC's technology direction. You'll create and evolve strategic roadmaps, influence policy, and ensure architectural decisions align with organisational goals. Your work will directly impact HMRC's ability to deliver secure, scalable, and innovative solutions for colleagues and customers.

The main responsibilities include developing and maintaining a comprehensive IT architecture strategy by setting standards, technical policy, and direction for HMRC's IT estate. This involves creating and managing reference architectures, defining metadata and taxonomies, and ensuring architectural decisions are aligned with strategic goals and best practices. There is a strong focus on supporting solution design to maximise technology investments, driving innovation, and promoting the standardisation and adoption of enterprise architecture tools and practices. Balanced governance is essential, encouraging both compliance and flexibility, while processes are streamlined to achieve efficiency and scalability.

The successful candidate will optimise EA processes and tool usage for efficiency and scalability, design templates, enforce data standards, and manage artefact catalogues within EA tooling. They will model complex systems logically and communicate technical concepts clearly to diverse audiences, develop and maintain architectural standards aligned with the enterprise IT strategy, and provide consultancy and guidance to build internal capability and foster a self-sustaining architecture community all while understanding commercial and sourcing strategies to support enterprise impact.

Please note: Security Check (SC) clearance level, either already held or willing to obtain, is a requirement of this role.

Essential Criteria: Architecture Tooling, Commercial perspective, Community collaboration, Enterprise Architecture, Problem definition and shaping, Strategy design. You should provide specific instances to demonstrate your suitability for the role.

During the panel interview, you will be asked Experience-based questions, and questions on the remaining Technical Skills: Architect for the whole context, Architecture communication, Making architectural decisions. You will be asked at least 1 question per technical skill to assess your suitability for the position. When answering you will be required to provide a specific example which demonstrates the technical skill. You are advised to apply the STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Result) technique when delivering examples. You are encouraged to prepare demonstratable examples of your experience ahead of the interview to ensure meaningfulness and completeness. You will also be asked to prepare and deliver a 10-minute presentation, using slides and narration, describing "the approach for designing and implementing an Architectural Repository within a large public sector organisation". The presentation should also include recommended governance procedures for ensuring ongoing integrity and value of the repository throughout its lifecycle within the organisation. Interviews will take place via video link (Microsoft Teams).