Salary: £39,000 - 44,200 per year Requirements: Proven experience as a Technical Architect in complex enterprise, government, scientific, defence, or highly regulated environments. Strong background in service-oriented architecture, distributed systems, and microservices architecture. Experience designing and governing large-scale API and integration strategies. Strong understanding of messaging technologies, message brokers, and event-driven architectures. Experience with GraphQL, graph-based architectures, or alternative API gateway and integration approaches. Strong understanding of real-time data flows, data processing pipelines, and distributed data management. Experience working with Java-based enterprise applications and hybrid legacy-modern integration. Knowledge of cloud-native architecture principles and modern deployment methodologies. Experience producing detailed architectural documentation, standards, and technical governance artefacts. Strong understanding of non-functional requirements including resilience, scalability, reliability, determinism, and maintainability. Experience working within Agile software delivery environments. Excellent stakeholder management and communication skills with the ability to explain complex technical concepts clearly. Experience supporting continuous delivery, DevOps practices, and automated testing strategies. Ability to provide technical leadership across multidisciplinary engineering teams. Knowledge of secure system design and regulated environments. Responsibilities: Review the existing architecture and identify strengths, technical debt, architectural risks, and opportunities for improvement. Assess current service-oriented architecture implementations, including core services, interfaces, and deployment models. Define and document scalable architectural solutions that support long-term operational resilience, maintainability, and adaptability. Evaluate the use of message bus technologies and event-driven architecture patterns across distributed systems. Analyse and document complex system-wide data flows, including real-time data, metadata, configuration data, and processed experimental data. Assess the suitability of graph-based API layers and integration models, including GraphQL and federated graph approaches where appropriate. Produce high-level and low-level architectural documentation, diagrams, standards, and technical roadmaps. Define architectural standards for APIs, messaging frameworks, configuration management, and data models. Support the development of hybrid solutions integrating modern services with existing Java-based applications. Collaborate with multidisciplinary development teams to ensure alignment with architectural strategy and best practice. Provide technical leadership and governance across software engineering and integration activities. Support incremental delivery approaches and continuous improvement initiatives. Review software requirements and ensure the technical architecture supports future deployment and scalability needs. Drive best practice around service testing, integration testing, test data management, and service lifecycle management. Document key architectural decisions, technical trade-offs, and implementation rationale. Technologies: API Architect Cloud DevOps GraphQL Support Java microservices More: We are recruiting a Technical Architect for a 12-month contract based in Didcot, supporting the evolution of complex scientific and data-driven platforms within a highly advanced Central Government environment. This is a permanent-style opportunity through Meritus with a day rate of £850 per day inside IR35. You will join a collaborative, multidisciplinary team working on scalable, resilient, and maintainable systems, with the opportunity to shape architectural standards, modernise integration patterns, and support critical scientific technology services. We also offer a referral scheme for candidates successfully placed through our team. last updated 20 week of 2026