Senior Solutions Architect - Central Government

Role: Senior Solutions Architect

Contract Length: 2–3 years, subject to programme needs

Location: Hybrid/London – 50% office attendance required

IR35: Inside

Pay Rate to Intermediary: Up to £749 per day

Spinwell is recruiting for a Senior Solutions Architect for an excellent opportunity within the public sector.

Responsibilities of the Senior Solutions Architect:

• Accountable for successful development of highly complex multi vendor solution architectures as part of programme delivery (typically with time frames of one year+), future business development, and ongoing business objectives.
• Accountable for accurate estimation of multi-vendor technical delivery budgets up to £40m+.
• Accountable for the creation and maintenance of the T&D Solution Architecture and Capability Roadmap, gaining the senior management approval of solution, technical delivery plan and technical delivery budget.
• Accountable for the systematic breakdown, and subsequent clear definition and allocation of work packages to multiple partners to inform budgets and plans across development, test, operational support/dash boards and infrastructure architecture.
• Accountable for the creation of high quality project solution architecture documentation describing how people, processes and technologies inter‑operate to deliver Tech and Data services, such as smart ticketing.
• Collaborate across Tech and Data to challenge budgets, discover and promote new business and solution architectures that support the business plan and reduce overall total cost to operate (TCO) different solutions.
• Ensure that solutions developed are aligned to the business architecture and its key principles throughout the delivery of programmes and that they continuously add value across their life cycle to the long‑term business plan.
• Promote architecture work to customers and key stakeholders and be an authoritative point of contact for business and solution architecture.
• Accountable for quality assurance of all team outputs, establishing people standards and building a strong tech capability.

Skills / Experience of the Senior Solutions Architect:

• Expert knowledge of large critical business and systems architectures, and modularisation techniques such as service oriented architecture and micro services.
• Expert knowledge of business capability modelling and requirements elicitation techniques.
• Detailed knowledge of process improvement frameworks such as Lean Six Sigma.
• Detailed knowledge of UML including functional decomposition, use cases, activity diagrams, sequence diagrams, components and interface design.
• Detailed knowledge and understanding of planning and project management tools and techniques.
• Broad knowledge in systems development technologies and methodologies, in particular agile scrum.
• Expert in mixed system development methodology environments, particularly in multi‑vendor (internal and external) environments.
• Expert in techniques to manage and resolve conflicting priorities in multi‑vendor environments, ensuring balanced and timely decision making that is cost effective and does not yield unnecessary risks to client.
• Broad knowledge of customer facing and back office technologies and architectures, particularly those that relate to public transport operations.
• Degree in relevant subject area or TOGAF certification is desirable.
• Strong skills in architecting business critical systems with lean processes and total cost optimisation.
• Ability to take a high level set of requirements/management brief and build a concept business architecture using standardised tooling and modelling techniques.
• Refining the architecture as more information is discovered, decisions identified and choices made.
• Ability to analyse complex business scenarios, identify key decision points, opportunities, draw conclusions and produce architecture roadmaps.
• Ability to map the traceability between a business and technical requirement.
• Ability to communicate effectively, both orally and in writing, with people involved in business initiatives.
• Managing effectively with ambiguity across multiple stakeholders and projects.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills including ability to explain complex information with senior management and directors, produce summary and feasibility reports on complex technical and business issues.
• Of graduate calibre with an excellent understanding of structured architecture approaches such as TOGAF.
• Have experience of optimising business process implementation in multi‑tier business systems.
• Proven experience of developing business and systems architecture within an overall agile development process.
• Fully familiar with the tools and techniques used.
• A team player committed to getting the job done in a timely and quality driven manner.
• Have sound understanding of highly available large‑scale business systems with specific experience of architecting cross‑functional high performance processing platforms (~100’s of transactions per second).
• Experience of communicating end to end solutions to a number of different audiences.

If you are a Senior Solutions Architect, apply now or send your CV to Spinwell! We welcome all applications regardless of background, in line with our commitment to diversity, equality and inclusion.