DESCRIPTION & REQUIREMENTS

Job Title: Principal Enterprise Architect

Location: Aberdeen

Reporting to: Chief Digital & Information Officer

Number of Roles Available: 1

Company Overview:

Join Great British Energy and be part of powering the UK’s Clean Energy Future.

At GBE, we’re not just building an energy company – we’re shaping the future of the UK’s energy landscape.

Our mission is clear:

• Drive clean energy deployment across the UK as a strategic developer, investor, and owner of renewable projects
• Deliver benefits for communities and taxpayers, ensuring the clean energy transition creates jobs, boosts local economies, and increases public ownership
• We focus on innovation, sustainability, and impact, working on projects that matter – from large-scale national renewable investments to empowering local and community energy initiatives.

Joining GBE means

• Purpose-driven work Be part of a national effort to accelerate the clean energy transition
• Career growth Opportunities to develop expertise in cutting-edge energy technologies and strategic investment
• Collaboration and flexibility Work with passionate professionals in a dynamic, forward-thinking environment

We welcome applications from all backgrounds and communities. If you require reasonable adjustments during the recruitment process, please let us know.

About the Role:

The role reports to the Chief Digital & Information Officer and is one of the small leadership group standing up GBE’s digital function, alongside the CDIO and the Chief Information Security Officer. The postholder chairs the Architecture Review Board, acting as GBE’s design authority and assuring investment proposals before they reach the Digital Investment Governance Committee, the CEO‑chaired body that approves significant digital investment.

This is a rare greenfield mandate. The foundational work on GBE’s security standards and core technology is already underway, with every significant decision and its reasoning recorded so that the incoming postholder can review, confirm and own those decisions rather than start from a blank page. The budget and the mandate to build a small architecture team are in place. Few roles offer the chance to set the technology direction of a national institution this early in its life.

Key Responsibilities:

• Take ownership of the architecture decisions made during the establishment phase: review the recorded decision log, confirm or adjust the recommendations against the evidence, and carry them into delivery.
• Land GBE’s foundational technology choices — cloud, GBE’s own productivity and collaboration environment, and staff identity and access — and lead the design of the move away from shared, inherited services.
• Stand up the Architecture Review Board and Technical Design Authority as working design authorities, with a proportionate, fast assurance route into investment decisions.
• Publish the first full set of architecture principles, standards and the target‑state reference architecture, and put them to work in live procurements and delivery.
• Publish an enterprise capability and operating-model view linking business priorities, information, processes, people and technology to the target-state roadmap.
• Recruit the architecture team and build the practice, blending permanent hires with partner capacity.
• Be a part of the build team to execute the vision.
• Set the architecture requirements and standards for GBE’s strategic partner framework and assure the first major deliveries against them, including core business systems and the data platform.
• Establish the data and AI architecture patterns that let the business adopt AI quickly and responsibly, and turn successful pilots into scalable products.
• Oversee the establishment of GBE’s digital landscape — foundations that will serve the organisation for years to come — showing measurable value along the way.