Solution Architect

Purpose of the role

The Architecture team are part of the Digital Data and Technology (DDaT) directorate of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Corporate services. The team is responsible for building, delivering, and iterating the digital, data and technology services used by UKRI in pursuit of their organisational goals. DDaT is an enabler in UKRI, where nine councils are transforming to represent one large organisation responsible for driving research and innovation across the UK economy. The services are core to providing a modern and enabling interface between DDaT and its internal and external stakeholders.

As a Solution Architect, you will design, review, interpret and respond to detailed business requirements (including non-functional requirements), ensuring that your domain can technically deliver business needs. You will take responsibility for a specific area of specialisation and its interdependencies with the other domains and services, whilst feeding into the Enterprise Architecture roadmap. You will oversee the development, testing, and implementation of technical solutions, reporting on delivery commitments to ensure solutions are implemented as expected and to agreed timeframes.

Key Areas of Accountability

• Design logical and physical components of technology architectures to deliver the required business outcome and service
• Look forwards to identify common needs and gaps, working with the broader team to influence the technology roadmaps and necessary components
• Create appropriate formal architecture products, including product selection and options and impact assessments to validate solution choices, enabling traceability and providing corporate knowledge for ongoing support efforts
• Partner with Project Managers and Service Owners to provide whole life costing for the architecture components to facilitate best value approaches and inform the organisation as to the economy of their solutions estate
• Work with commercial colleagues to provide input to "tender" materials and conduct supplier and product evaluation
• Support technical and architectural requirements
• Capture design and assurance, including injection of architectural stories into backlogs
• Actively support and contribute to the domain by providing specialist insight and hands-on experience in applying the technology to the broader enterprise context
• Work closely alongside technical teams by engaging them early to listen to their concerns about implementing a design and ensure that they are implementing solutions in keeping with your design so that they are sustainable and manageable throughout life
• Own the Solution Architecture overview documentation and any roadmaps for your domain and be responsible for keeping it up to date throughout its lifecycle and attending the UKRI Technology Governance with any changes as necessary
• Responsible for approving any changes to the technical design and will present these to technical design boards for ratification
• Capable of presenting and explaining technical solutions in a non-technical way to senior stakeholders.

Essential Knowledge, Skills, and Experience

Knowledge

• Complex IT programme architecture involving dependency management and multi-supplier deliveries in a solution architecture capacity
• Practical understanding of reusable architectural standards and patterns for your domain
• Understanding of the range of technologies and approaches which we could select to deliver a solution
• How to prove, pilot and learn new technologies and keep up to date with industry best-practice, domain disruptors and adapt accordingly
• Demonstrate the ability to identify areas where specialist input is required and to coordinate the resources necessary and consider the advice and information constructively in the context of an end-to-end service
• The appropriate time to decide and identify when an error in judgment has occurred and learn from it.

Skills

• Familiar with modern architectures and able to design solutions that use these to deliver solutions that meet user needs
• Innovative and able to apply this to your work
• Aware of and understands Agile methodology and how to apply the Agile mindset to all aspects of your work
• Ability to work in a fast-paced, evolving environment and utilise an iterative method and flexible approach to enable rapid delivery
• Unafraid to take risks, willing to learn from mistakes and appreciates the importance of agile project delivery for digital projects in government
• Able to ensure the team has situational awareness of what each other is working on and how this relates to practical objectives and user needs
• Capable of collaboratively investigating, analysing and solving complex problems and concepts and make disciplined decisions based on available information
• Apply thinking, gathering and analysing information using comprehensive tools and techniques, using data to formulate both short term day-to-day and mid-term plans, and identifying and exploring options to assess both feasibility and operational impact
• Ensure a given solution aligns with the enterprise architecture and identifies and recognises a viable solution or control.

Experience

We are looking for candidates with proven and substantial expertise in:

• Defining requirements in an agile development framework based on user needs, from vision to epics to user stories and tasks
• Identifying opportunities for service and business improvement, pinpointing opportunities to allow organisations like UKRI to perform more effectively
• Justifying domain investment, ideally knowing the GDS spend approval process
• Specifying requirements from both a business and user perspective to enable agreed changes to be implemented effectively
• Identifying, analysing and managing relationships with processes and people related to your domain
• Communicate with stakeholders clearly and regularly, clarifying mutual needs and commitments through consultation and consideration of impacts whilst focusing on user needs
• An architect on an enterprise-scale cloud computing platform using Agile methodology.

Qualifications

• Educated to Degree-level or equivalent
• TOGAF or SAFe or Agile Architecture qualification.

Competencies

Able to demonstrate the following technical skills from Government Digital Services Digital, Data and Technology Profession Capability Framework https://www.gov.uk/guidance/technical-architect#senior-technical-architect

Practitioner Level

• Turning business problems into a technical design
• Communication skills
• Governance.

Working Level

• Strategy
• Understanding the whole context
• Making and guiding decisions
• Able to demonstrate the following behaviours at Level 3 from Civil Service Success Profiles

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/717275/CS_Behaviours_2018.pdf

• Changing and improving
• Making effective decisions
• Communicating and influencing
• Developing self and others
• Delivering at pace.

If you experience any issue applying, please contact Resourcing@careersportal.co.uk.