Job Description:

Salary:

£70,000 - £85,000

Leonardo UK operates a grade-based salary framework with broad bands. The salary range shown reflects the approved grade band for this role, or a narrower hiring range published within that band, and is benchmarked against the external market. Exceptions above the standard range are managed through governance controls to protect internal equity.

Your Impact

Join Leonardo UK as Domain Architect – Digital Backbone and Digital Employee Experience and take ownership of the target architecture, long-term roadmap and investment story for the platforms every person, product and programme in the business depends on.

Two connected domains sit behind everything we do. The Digital Backbone covers the compute, storage, network, datacentre, cloud and platform engineering estate that our business-critical services run on. Digital Employee Experience covers the workplace, collaboration, identity and device estate our people use every day. Both domains are being modernised at pace, and both require clear architectural direction, credible investment planning and disciplined assurance.

This is a Strategy-to-Portfolio architecture role. It is not primarily a project delivery post: the successful candidate will set the direction that delivery teams work towards, assure that what is built reflects what was designed, agreed and funded, and help shape the investment choices that determine Leonardo UK’s future technology foundation.

You will work closely with the Head of Enterprise Architecture UK, the Digital Solutions CTO UK and CTO Italy, fellow Enterprise and Domain Architects, Security Architects, Solution Architects, service owners and technology governance bodies, including the Global Architecture Board. You will be recognised as an authority on the current estate, its direction of travel and the architectural decisions required to make it secure, resilient, affordable and scalable.

We believe high-impact architecture is driven by outcomes. This role operates on a flexible hybrid working model, with purposeful travel to site for design workshops, architecture boards and key stakeholder sessions.

This role reports to the Head of Enterprise Architecture UK.

In this role you will:

• Own the target state for both domains, convert it into a funded and sequenced multi-year roadmap, assure delivery against it, and raise the standard of architecture practice across the community that builds it.
• Domain architecture and target state
  • Define and maintain the target architecture across Digital Workplace, Network and Hosting, Cloud and Hybrid, and Platform Engineering, including capability-level views, principles, standards and reference patterns.
  • Maintain an accurate baseline of the current estate, working with domain and service owners so landscape models reflect reality.
  • Align to Cybersecurity and Monitoring and Observability capability models owned elsewhere in the function, ensuring designs integrate with and are assured against them.
  • Contribute domain content to cross-cutting standards and represent the domains at architecture governance forums.
• Demand, risk and emerging technology
  • Bring together the signals that shape the plan: risk and obsolescence, programme and bid demand, growth and acquisition activity, supplier and market direction, and the security threat picture.
  • Translate those signals into a concise, defensible set of domain drivers that underpin the roadmap and investment plan.
  • Assess emerging technology on evidence rather than hype, using proportionate proof-of-value activity and clear adopt, trial, watch or avoid recommendations.
  • Maintain awareness of relevant vendor, open-source and industry direction, incorporating it into domain standards and roadmaps where it earns its place.
• Roadmaps and long-term planning
  • Own and maintain a rolling three-year domain roadmap with a five-year technology outlook, refreshed on a predictable cycle.
  • Sequence change around the constraints that genuinely matter: hardware and operating system lifecycle, licence and contract renewals, datacentre and cloud commitments, and the rate of change the business can absorb.
  • Model options and trade-offs — buy or build, cloud or on-premises, refresh or replace — making cost, risk and capability impact explicit.
  • Plan headroom for growth so capacity, licensing and footprint decisions do not become tomorrow’s constraint.
  • Maintain a single published view of obsolescence and technical debt, with the cost of inaction quantified.
• Investment planning
  • Convert roadmap increments into investment items with indicative cost, benefit, dependency and delivery-confidence ranges.
  • Provide the architecture content for business cases, stage gates and portfolio submissions.
  • Work with Finance, Portfolio and Service Owners on affordability, phasing and the run-cost consequences of design choices.
  • Advise on prioritisation where demand exceeds available funding, and trace approved investment back to the roadmap, so plan and architecture do not drift apart.
• Architecture assurance and governance
  • Act as a standing member of the design authority for both domains, reviewing and approving high-level designs, patterns and deviations.
  • Provide the architecture opinion at portfolio and delivery gates, confirming alignment to target state, secure-by-design principles, supportability and affordability.
  • Own the reference patterns, standards and guardrails that architects reuse, keeping them current and making the compliant path the easy path.
  • Operate a transparent dispensation process where exceptions are time-bound, owned, costed and logged as debt rather than quietly absorbed.
• Community leadership and mentoring
  • Act as architectural mentor and technical sounding board to Solution and Technical Architects across the delivery portfolio, providing matrix support rather than line management.
  • Pair on hard problems early, including option analysis, non-functional requirements, integration and migration approach.
  • Review designs constructively and early enough to change the outcome, rather than acting as a late-stage veto.
  • Run a domain architecture community of practice, including pattern reviews, worked examples, lessons learned and a shared design library.
  • Build capability deliberately through development plans, certification pathways and stretch work, and hold supplier architects to the same standard.