Lead Architect - Ministry of Justice - G6 in Manchester

We’re recruiting for Lead Architects here at Justice Digital, to be part of our warm and collaborative teams within the Legal Aid Agency. Our lead architects are responsible for assuring, designing, and delivering digital services that make a genuine difference to people’s lives. A Lead Architect will work alongside a service owner, overseeing the work of up to 10 engineering teams. Together we will collaborate to develop our strategy, connect people and build trust with clear communication, and provide empathetic technical leadership across diverse teams.

This role aligns against the Lead Technical Architect Role from the Government Digital and Data Framework. Our Lead Architects will work to understand our technology, our business, and our people (colleagues, stakeholders, and users of our services), and to create an ambitious and pragmatic vision for our teams, using their technical expertise to bring our challenges and opportunities into focus alongside the views of other professions in our leadership team.

In LAA Digital, we believe that architecture is not purely a technical discipline. The systems we build are shaped by the teams that build them, the organisational structures they sit within, and the communication patterns between the people involved. Our architects think about how team structures, domain boundaries, and organisational dynamics shape systems — and how the systems we design, in turn, shape the organisation. We are looking for people who understand that designing great systems means co‑designing the social and technical dimensions together, and who bring both technical depth and organisational awareness to their work.

This role requires clear communication and structured thinking skills. A Lead Architect can see the big picture, understanding our complex technology landscape, and can clearly and effectively communicate with both specialist and non‑specialist audiences. By building trust, developing great relationships, and empathising with others you will support the development of the architecture community and engineering leadership within your service area, providing guidance, mentorship, and technical leadership across teams.

A Lead Architect will have a good understanding of a broad range of technologies, with hands‑on experience in both software engineering and commercial enterprise, as well as providing effective governance, both within our organisation, and across our suppliers.

Benefits

• A generous employer pension contribution of 28.97% through the Civil Service Pension Scheme.
• 25 days of annual leave, (increasing to 30 days once you have reached 5 years of service), plus 8 bank holidays and a privilege day for the King’s birthday.
• Flexible working arrangements including hybrid working, working part time or compressed hours, designed to support a positive work‑life balance.
• Employees are allocated 10% of their working time for personal and professional development.
• A £1k per person learning budget is in place to support all our people, with access to best‑in‑class conferences and seminars, accreditation with professional bodies, fully funded vocational programmes and e‑learning platforms.
• Compassionate maternity, adoption, and shared parental leave policies, with up to 26 weeks leave at full pay, 13 weeks with partial pay, and 13 weeks further leave.
• Maternity support/paternity leave at full pay for 2 weeks.

To help picture your life at MoJ Justice Digital, Data and Science please take a look at our blog.

Key Responsibilities

• Create a technical vision for Legal Aid, develop our strategy, and be accountable for our technology estate as part of our Architect Leadership Team.
• Communicate about our technology across teams and professions, not just within our Digital unit but across all parts of the Ministry of Justice and with our suppliers and partners; seeing the big picture and bringing it to all stakeholders.
• Collaborate and find agreement with senior stakeholders, providing both technical and non‑technical direction and challenge, as well as pragmatic compromise to deliver value.
• Maintain a holistic view of the end‑to‑end service ecosystem within Legal Aid, identifying technical dependencies and risks, actively seeking opportunities for improvement and collaboration, and ensuring we as a profession are actively producing, maintaining, and owning the associated enterprise architecture documentation.
• Empower teams to make pragmatic and incremental change, through influence and inspiration, setting both a vision for the future and an empathetic path that people and teams will be able to follow.
• Guide and influence choices to align with strategy, and seek out opportunities for digital transformation, helping all understand the value of technical decisions.
• Engage with our portfolio, assurance, risk management, cyber, and information assurance leadership to ensure their priorities are represented alongside those of the business and other digital teams.
• Mentor, coach, line‑manage, and recruit more great architects and engineering leadership, helping build a sustainable workforce plan to deliver our strategy.
• Champion inclusive working practices and support efforts to grow diversity, inclusivity and balance across engineering roles.
• Run community‑of‑practice initiatives within the architecture and engineering functions.
• Promote open dialogue, collaborative problem solving, and continuous learning within our technical community.

Our Tech Stack

This is our tech, both strategic and legacy. You don’t need to have experience with all of these, but we hope you see some familiar things:

• Modern languages and frameworks built in Ruby, Java, and Python.
• Resilient infrastructure in the cloud (primarily AWS), using infrastructure as code (IaC) and platforms as a service (PaaS).
• Progressive software development practices such as Domain‑Driven Design (DDD), test‑driven development (TDD), continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD).
• A new multi‑tier architecture, creating central data and business logic platforms to accelerate our product development.
• Enterprise Oracle software, including Enterprise Resource Planning (E‑Business Suite).
• Mac or Windows‑based development environments and public GitHub repositories.

If you’re interested in finding out more about the work our architects do in LAA Digital, please join us on 10th June at 12:00. In the session, we will explain a little more about the recruitment process and what it is like to work within the Civil Service. More importantly, you’ll hear first‑hand from our lead architects about the work they do. Please come along with your questions and learn more about the team and the role.

Person Specification

Essential

• A systems thinking mindset and the ability to see the big picture – how changes in one part of a sociotechnical system (people, process, technology, governance) affect others, to reason about emergent behaviours in complex environments, and to make trade‑offs accordingly leading to iterative, outcome‑focused, and effective change towards a strategic vision.
• Comfort with ambiguity and complexity is essential.
• Demonstrated leadership experience in a technical, solution, or infrastructure architecture role, with a background in either software engineering or enterprise architecture, acting as a recognised expert to guide, critique, and support teams.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to distil complex and nuanced information into clear, concise messaging at all levels, from specialist developers through to non‑technical executive leadership, developing mutual understanding and trust to drive consensus and reach decisions.
• Experience assuring services in a complex technical estate through effective risk management and technical governance, both within your own teams and across commercial engagements with third parties.
• Practical knowledge of modern application architectures (e.g., microservices, APIs, web frameworks, data persistence technologies or event‑driven architecture in public cloud environments).
• Experience in introducing and championing best practices such as agile development, domain‑driven design (DDD), test‑driven development (TDD), continuous integration (CI), continuous delivery (CD), and DevOps, fostering high‑quality engineering culture within teams.
• Willingness to be assessed against the requirements for SC clearance.

We welcome the unique contribution diverse applicants bring and do not discriminate based on culture, ethnicity, race, nationality or national origin, age, sex, gender identity or expression, religion or belief, disability status, sexual orientation, educational or social background or any other factor. Our values are Purpose, Humanity, Openness and Together. Find out more here about how we celebrate diversity and an inclusive culture in our workplace.

The Civil Service is committed to attract, retain and invest in talent wherever it is found. To learn more please see the Civil Service People Plan and the Civil Service D&I Strategy.