Enterprise Architect

Contract type: Permanent

Location: London or Newcastle with a minimum of 2 days per week in the office in line with our hybrid working policy.

Salary: Newcastle: Salary- c£61,250; London Salary -c£70,000 more may be available for exceptional candidates

The National Audit Office (NAO) is the UK’s main public sector audit body. Independent of government, we have responsibility for auditing the accounts of various public sector bodies, examining the propriety of government spending, assessing risks to financial control and accountability, and reviewing the economy, efficiency and effectiveness of programmes, projects, and activities.

The NAO’s Digital Services (DS) function is seeking an Enterprise Architect responsible for bridging the gap between our business strategy and technology execution. This pivotal role involves overseeing the organisation's technology landscape, ensuring that systems, data, and processes align seamlessly to support the NAO's overarching goals. The Enterprise Architect will be instrumental in mapping the current tech stack, reducing technical complexity, and establishing robust architecture governance.

Main purpose of the role

Crucially, this role will support the Data and AI team by providing the enterprise architecture standards, patterns, and integration guidance needed to help deliver the data strategy. The postholder will work collaboratively with Data and AI leadership, taking strategic direction on domain-specific requirements while ensuring the wider technology landscape remains coherent, secure, scalable, and aligned to organisational priorities.

In this role, you will:

• Align overarching technology strategy with the NAO’s business goals and objectives.
• Develop and maintain the architectural roadmap, mapping the transition from current state to future state.
• Audit existing technology stacks to reduce complexity, identify redundancies, and consolidate tools where appropriate.
• Establish, mature, and govern the rules, frameworks, standards, processes, and practices for how technology is acquired, designed, built, reviewed, and deployed across the organisation, including through wider Architecture Review Board and Design Authority activities.
• Partner closely with the Data & AI team to operationalise the data strategy, taking their lead on domain-specific requirements to provide supportive enterprise-level architecture.
• Continuously scan the horizon for emerging technologies (e.g., advanced cloud capabilities) to assess their value for the organisation.

This role reports into the Head of Audit Technology.

Main responsibilities

• Developing and maintaining comprehensive enterprise architecture models, diagrams, and target-state designs.
• Aligning technology investments with business strategy to ensure value delivery and operational efficiency.
• Auditing the current technology stack to identify redundancies, opportunities for consolidation, and areas to reduce technical debt.
• Establishing and applying architectural standards, governance frameworks, and best practices across technology domains.
• Partnering with the Data & AI team to support their data strategy.
• Evaluating emerging technologies to determine their potential value and applicability to the NAO’s objectives.
• Collaborating with cross-functional teams—including solution architects, developers, security, and business stakeholders—to ensure cohesive enterprise solutions that meet organisational needs.
• Taking an active role in wider Architecture Review Board and Design Authority activities, providing architectural governance, assurance, challenge, and oversight across programmes and change initiatives.
• Maturing the NAO’s enterprise architecture processes, practices, artefacts, and engagement model so that architectural guidance is practical, proportionate, repeatable, and embedded in delivery ways of working.
• Working with the Data Architect to produce and publish an enterprise data architecture blueprint that aligns data management, integration, governance, and platform choices with the NAO’s wider enterprise architecture standards.
• Support the Data and AI team to align the data strategy with the broader business and technology strategy, ensuring that data architecture decisions are consistent with enterprise standards, security expectations, and delivery priorities.
• Working with the Data Architect to design and configure the central data management repository, ensuring it supports architecture documentation, data governance, lineage, ownership, and reuse across the organisation.

Key skills / competencies required

• Architect for the whole context: You can assess how trends in society and industry practices might impact the organisation; work with people outside of your organisation to inform policies, strategies and standards; anticipate changes to policy and build resilience through your architectural work; coach others in identifying important trends. (Skill Level: Expert)
• Architecture communication: You can communicate with technical and non-technical stakeholders at all levels, and across organisations, using architecture communication techniques; mediate between people in difficult architectural discussions; gain support from business and technical stakeholders for architectural initiatives with high levels of risk, impact and complexity; coach and support others in architecture communication. (Skill Level: Expert)
• Commercial perspective: You can identify appropriate contractual frameworks and approaches; identify, evaluate and select appropriate suppliers. (Skill Level: Practitioner)
• Community collaboration: You can work collaboratively in a group, actively networking with others; adapt feedback to ensure its effective and lasting; use your initiative to identify problems or issues in the team dynamic and rectify them; identify issues through Agile ‘health checks’ with the team, and help to stimulate the right responses. (Skill Level: Practitioner)
• Enterprise architecture: You can design an architecture that defines the technology, people, process and other elements needed to achieve organisation objectives; work with others across the organisation to ensure your design is used to achieve the organisation’s objectives. (Skill Level: Practitioner)
• Making architectural decisions: You can make and guide architectural design decisions characterised by medium risk and complexity; identify and address architectural risks that affect multiple teams or domains; use architectural governance and assurance to make design decisions and manage technical risks at the appropriate level; contribute to the development of architectural governance and assurance. (Skill Level: Practitioner)
• Problem definition and shaping: You can lead the framing of a problem characterised by high complexity, complication, or risk so that a solution can be created; coach others in defining problems and describing appropriate options for solutions; help others challenge requirements and assumptions, and identify opportunities when defining problems and solution options. (Skill Level: Expert)
• Strategy design: You can define and connect strategies or visions across the organisation or wider government; enable the implementation of strategies or visions across the organisation or wider government, for example, by advocating for resources and removing blockers. (Skill Level: Expert)

Essential criteria

• Proven experience working as an Enterprise Architect or Lead Solution Architect in a complex organisational environment.
• Demonstrated experience in designing and implementing enterprise-wide technology strategies, cloud adoption (e.g., Azure), and governance frameworks.
• Demonstrated experience auditing technology landscapes, consolidating systems, and successfully reducing technical debt.
• Experience working collaboratively with specialised teams. You must have a track record of enabling and supporting specific domain strategies rather than dictating technical direction.
• Demonstrated experience communicating complex technical concepts to executive leadership and non-technical stakeholders.

The closing date for applications is 23:59 on Sunday 16th August.

Selection process

Shortlisted candidates will be invited to attend 1st stage interview which will be held online on 2-4th September. Second-stage interviews will be held in person and will take place on 9-11th September.

Nationality Requirements:

• UK nationals
• Nationals of Commonwealth countries who have the right to work in the UK
• Nationals from the EU, EEA or Switzerland with (or eligible for) status under the European Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS)

Equal opportunities and diversity

Disability and Reasonable Adjustments: Applicants with a disability who wish their application to be considered under the Disability Confident scheme should confirm this when submitting their application. Under this scheme we guarantee an interview to an applicant with a disability who meets the minimum requirements for the role. You should also let our HR team know if you wish us to consider any Reasonable Adjustments at any stage of the process (HR Service Desk (HRServiceDesk@nao.org.uk)). We are committed to fair and open recruitment. All applications will be assessed on merit against the requirements of the role. We do not discriminate on the basis of any protected characteristic as defined by the Equality Act 2010.