Service Architect – UK Home Office
Salary: £80,237 plus skills allowance of up to £13,700 pending assessment.
Location: Croydon (hybrid, 60% office attendance).
Advert Close: 12th January 2026 11:55pm.
SC clearance required (5 years UK residency in the past 5 years). Candidates must also hold or be prepared to undergo NPPV3 clearance.
Home Office Digital designs, builds and develops services for the rest of the department and for government. Our systems support up to 3 million visa applications, 100 million border checks, 8 million passport applications and 140 million police checks on people, vehicles and property.
Responsibilites
* Ensure that service designs to support new services are comprehensive, efficient and reuse existing capability, determining the required resourcing for the transition pipeline and allocating resources accordingly, while ensuring suitable recharge agreements.
* Develop and document service designs for the integration and implementation of solutions, working across areas of the business to ensure requirements are included in business cases, project plans, supplier procurements and Service Design Packages.
* Exercise strong stakeholder management skills to drive completion of a service design, including brokering decisions and bridging technical and business disputes by weighing up risk, complexity impact and deliverability and presenting at senior stakeholder boards.
* Lead the evaluation of a new service once it has been integrated, identifying best practices and lessons learned to incorporate into future integration plans.
* Create detailed plans for the integration of new services into existing architecture, considering the broader context, strategies and operating model of the organisation, maintaining a transition pipeline within a given Portfolio or Product area with a forward view of two years.
* Define and help shape best practices and standards within Architecture and SADI teams, in line with continual service improvement.
* Review, negotiate, update and create Service Level and Operating Level Agreements (SLAs / OLAs).
Essential Skills & Experience
* Evidencing strong process, technical and team leadership skills, with a passion for delivering leading edge designs and inspiring a culture of technical excellence and innovative solution design.
* Navigating the complex landscapes of technologies, 3rd party suppliers (driving the procurement process), internal and cross‑government teams.
* Managing and delivering complex service solutions within time, cost and quality targets, ensuring solutions are robust, resilient, and appropriately implemented, tested and documented.
* Defining standards, owning and contributing to the technical roadmap and strategy.
* Anticipating and advising on future technology changes that present opportunities for the product or service.
* Communicating clearly in a language which meets the needs of different users and stakeholders through selecting the appropriate channels and formats, and managing expectations whilst adapting to stakeholders’ reactions with flexibility.
* 25 days annual leave on appointment, rising with service.
* Eight days public holidays, plus one additional privilege day.
* 26 weeks maternity, adoption or shared parental leave at full pay, followed by 13 weeks statutory pay and a further 13 weeks unpaid, after qualifying service.
* Paid leave for fostering approval processes, support when a child is substantively placed with you plus a foster to adopt policy.
* Corporate membership of ‘Employers for Carers’ providing additional information and advice for carers, plus a ‘Carer’s Passport’ to discuss workplace needs and underpin supportive conversations.
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