Senior Enterprise Architect (Borders & Trade) - Birmingham

About the job

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. We are undergoing a major transformation to modernise and future-proof our IT estate, supporting one of the largest and most complex operational environments in the public sector.

This is an exciting opportunity to join a forward-thinking group at the forefront of digital innovation, where your expertise will help drive the delivery of robust, scalable, and secure technology solutions that have a profound impact on both HMRC's customers and colleagues.

Job description

As a Senior Enterprise Architect, you will play a pivotal role in shaping how HMRC delivers technology at enterprise scale. Operating at the intersection of business strategy, policy and technology, you will define and evolve architectural direction that enables secure, scalable and sustainable services across the Borders Trade estate. Your work will directly influence how HMRC invests in technology, adopts new capabilities, and manages complexity across imports, exports, transit, excise and environmental taxes. By setting clear architectural strategy and standards, you will help ensure technology decisions deliver maximum value for customers, colleagues and the wider UK economy.

Person specification

You will bring a strong professional architecture mindset, informed by recognised enterprise architecture practices and continuous learning. This may include experience with commercial and sourcing considerations, cloud platforms (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS), and working towards or holding relevant professional architecture qualifications. This professional grounding supports effective architectural governance, credible engagement with commercial and policy colleagues, and confident leadership of enterprise scale change.

What You'll Do

• Own and evolve the enterprise architecture strategy for the Borders Trade domain, ensuring alignment with HMRC's wider organisational objectives and policy intent.
• Develop, maintain and govern architectural principles, standards, roadmaps and reference architectures that guide technology investment and solution design.
• Provide enterprise level assurance and decision support, ensuring proposed solutions and investments deliver value, manage risk and align with long term architectural direction.
• Influence policy and set technical direction across the Enterprise Operations estate, shaping how technology supports regulatory, operational and customer outcomes.
• Carry out horizon scanning, identifying emerging technologies, industry trends and sourcing models, and assessing their potential impact and opportunity for HMRC.
• Guide architectural decision making, clearly articulating trade-offs, risks and benefits, and recommending options based on enterprise wide considerations.
• Collaborate with senior stakeholders across business, technology and commercial functions to align architecture with strategic priorities and delivery plans.
• Promote continuous improvement and innovation, helping HMRC reduce complexity and improve resilience, security and scalability across its IT landscape.
• Contribute to the development of architectural capability, supporting colleagues and strengthening enterprise architecture practice across HMRC.

Essential Criteria:

• Enterprise Architecture Strategy Leadership - Proven experience operating as an Enterprise Architect (or equivalent), shaping and leading architecture strategy, roadmaps and direction for enterprise scale platforms or capabilities.
• Architectural Principles, Standards Governance - Strong experience developing and governing architectural principles, policies, standards and reference architectures to guide technology decision making.
• Whole Enterprise Thinking Impact Analysis - Ability to look beyond immediate problems to understand enterprise wide implications, dependencies and opportunities across systems, services and portfolios.
• Decision Support Trade off Analysis - Demonstrable ability to guide complex decision making, explain trade-offs, and make evidence based recommendations that balance risk, value and long term sustainability.
• Strategic Stakeholder Engagement - Experience influencing and engaging senior business and technology stakeholders, translating complex technical concepts into clear, accessible language.
• Horizon Scanning Innovation - Experience identifying emerging technologies, trends or sourcing approaches and assessing their relevance and impact within a large, complex organisation.

Benefits

Alongside your salary of 58,541, HM Revenue and Customs contributes 16,959 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. HMRC operates both Flexible and Hybrid Working policies, allowing you to balance your work and personal commitments. We welcome applications from those who need to work a more flexible arrangement and will agree to requests where possible, considering our operational and customer service needs. We offer a generous leave allowance, starting at 25 days and increasing by a day for every year of qualifying service up to a maximum of 30 days.

• Pension - We make contributions to our colleagues Alpha pension equal to at least 28.97% of their salary.
• Family friendly policies.
• Personal support.
• Coaching and development.