Lead Technical Architect – GDS – G6
Manchester Digital – Locations: Bristol, London, Manchester
The Government Digital Service (GDS) is the digital centre of government, responsible for setting, leading and delivering the vision for a modern digital government.
About the Job
As a GDS Lead Technical Architect, you will help design and drive the technical strategy for your area, ensuring alignment with broader GDS standards and goals. You will hold the vision for technical architecture best practice, build resilient and reliable government services, and communicate this to technical and non‑technical audiences.
Responsibilities
* Lead by example, act as a role model
* Contribute to the development and iteration of GDS architectural and engineering practices, principles and standards
* Design technical services or plan system integration, selecting necessary platforms and technologies to meet project requirements and user needs
* Provide technical leadership and consultancy to both internal and external development teams, ensuring designs and solutions are fit for purpose while meeting time and budget restraints
* Build and maintain technical roadmaps, looking ahead for future opportunities or blockers and ensuring decisions by development teams align with the strategy
* Encourage communication across multiple teams and wider organisational areas to identify strategic requirements and dependencies
* Help develop services by contributing code, testing technologies and producing rapid prototypes
* Advise teams on the right mix of capabilities to achieve their road‑mapped goals and desired service levels
* Act as a digital ambassador across government, supporting recruitment, identifying good practices for GDS to adopt and sharing experiences through blog posts, tech talks, etc.
* Assist in recruiting technical architects and other senior technologists, including sifting and interviewing
* Manage, coach and mentor more junior Technical Architects and others in the wider software engineering community
Qualifications
* Understanding of influencing, managing and challenging complex stakeholder relationships; ability to communicate with both technical and non‑technical audiences
* Passion for technology and its delivery in a user‑centric service, ensuring the right solutions meet outcomes for users
* Strong software development and application architecture experience, with knowledge of cloud technologies, open source, testing and at least one programming language (Ruby, Java, Python, JavaScript)
* Experience developing and managing high‑performing, agile technical teams and creating an inclusive, collaborative culture across boundaries and locations
* Practical knowledge at all levels of the web stack, from front‑end down to infrastructure and networking
* Deep understanding of modern technology practices (TDD, CI, CD, DevOps)
* Good knowledge of cloud security architecture, including threat modelling, analysis and operations
* Experience developing and implementing technical strategy and standards
* Experience defining and refining technical governance in multidisciplinary agile environments
If you meet a few of these criteria but think you might not meet all, please apply anyway.
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