A large Government client are seeking a Solutions Architect on an initial 6 month contract to work with them on their technology transformation. This role will fall inside of the IR35 Regulations and the successful candidate must have the following:

Key accountabilities and responsibilities

1. Understand an organisation's ecosystem and its inter-dependencies, ensuring quality and integrity of new solutions in our ecosystem
2. Design technical solutions to meet user and business needs and align with the clients technical strategy and standards
3. Guide projects in making the correct technology decisions, promoting reuse, sustainability and scalability to achieve value for money
4. Translate technical concepts between systems engineering, delivery management and service management, as well as developing and documenting the proposed technical design for the integration and implementation of any solution
5. Provide a consistent set of solution views, that communicate and describe the construction of the solution to all stakeholders, making the complex simple to understand
6. Work with internal stakeholders to support discovery and design work, blending technical and communication skills
7. Provide assurance to the Technical Design Authority that technical solutions comply with the Government Digital Services Technology Code of Practice design principles and standards
8. Working within the Architecture team, establish and maintain architectural principles, standards, blueprints, roadmaps and transitions states that underpin all technical design and delivery
9. Ensure technical quality and adherence of solution designs to the architectural principles, standards and enterprise architecture, whilst ensuring coherence with the wider government approach to technology
10. Lead the work within projects to embed the architectural design gates within the overall governance process ensuring reference information is published, maintained and readily available

Key skills and knowledge

1. A sound knowledge of architecture methodologies and frameworks and experience of their application
2. Experience of modern IT paradigms including event-based architecture design, containerisation, microservices and loose coupling
3. Experience of an API-first and services-led design approach, with the ability to use business requirements, user stories, data standards, and integration patterns to help to define services and APIs
4. An understanding of low-code technologies (particularly MS Power Platform , Dynamics and O365 products)
5. A good understanding of a broad range of technologies including development and specification languages (such as HTML/CSS, C# .Net and .NET Core, Java), transactional databases and DWHs, as well as some experience of NoSQL (such as CosmosDB and MongoDB) and CI/CD tools (such as Terraform and Jenkins)
6. A sound knowledge of cloud technologies, cloud hosting, container, serverless, and networking design patterns, tools and best practice (e.g. Microsoft Azure)

Key competencies

1. A broad and up-to-date knowledge of current state and emerging developments across technology areas including infrastructure, networks, applications and data; bringing this knowledge and expertise to bear in the design of systems
2. An ability to translate your understanding and communicate across technical and non-technical stakeholders, advocating for a dynamic, design-led and architected approach, as well as facilitating discussions within a multi-disciplinary team
3. Working with the Head of Enterprise Architecture, establish and maintain architectural principles, standards, blueprints, roadmaps and transitions states that underpin all technical design and delivery

Key performance measures

1. Supporting the development of the Architecture Practice across the client and across wider government
2. That all solutions support our architectural principles, standards, blueprints, roadmaps and transitions states