• Architecture Leadership: You will have deep experience in working in an architecture function and leading the development of the vision, principles, and strategy for architects for a set of products, projects, and technologies. You will be practised in creating technical standards, blueprints, reference architectures, roadmaps, transition states and target solutions across multiple services.
• Stakeholder Management: You will have proven ability to lead and influence stakeholders across multiple disciplines, crafting and advocating for long-term technical vision aligned with business strategy. This will include experience of interacting with, and influencing, senior stakeholders and a wide range of people across large teams, departments, suppliers, and customers.
• Communicating & Influencing: You will have exceptional communication skills, adept at translating complex technical concepts for both technical and non-technical audiences. Proven ability to collaborate effectively with cross-functional teams and build strong relationships with vendors.
• Delivery: You will have practical hands-on experience in technical and solution architecture and design including within programmes, projects, or a product-centric organisation, across agile and waterfall methodologies.
• Secure by Design: Proven track record of incorporating security considerations into all phases of the solution design lifecycle, ensuring compliance with relevant security standards and regulations.
• Making Effective Decisions: You will have strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with a demonstrated ability to identify and address technical challenges. You will be passionate about exploring and implementing innovative solutions to meet evolving government needs.
• General Technology Expertise: You will have a good understanding of a broad range of industry-standard technologies, both proprietary and open source, across a diverse range of Microsoft and Linux-based deployments, across physical, virtual, and containerised services.
• Cloud Expertise: Experience designing and implementing cloud solutions across major providers (Azure, AWS, GCP, Oracle) ideally including air-gapped and/or cloud deployments. Expertise in navigating platform-specific features and optimising and automating (IaC) deployments for maximum security, performance, and cost-effectiveness. Strong understanding of cloud governance models and compliance frameworks relevant to government environments.

Desirable Criteria

• On-Premise Classified Environments: Extensive experience architecting and securing solutions within highly sensitive and classified environments, including familiarity with relevant security policies, regulations, and best practices.
• Zero Trust: Deep understanding of zero trust principles and their application in designing secure architectures, including experience with identity-based access control, micro-segmentation, and data encryption.
• Identity & Access Management: Experience with identity and access management solutions, including privileged access management, and ability to architect secure authentication and authorisation mechanisms.
• Software Defined Data Centres: Experience with software-defined networking, storage, and compute solutions, including virtualization technologies and their implementation in government data centres.

Additional Info

A minimum 60% of your working time should be spent at your principal workplace in East Kilbride. Regular travel to other UK office locations will also be required - requirements to attend other locations for official business will also count towards this level of attendance.

Behaviours

We'll assess you against these behaviours during the selection process:

• Communicating and Influencing
• Delivering at Pace
• Managing a Quality Service

Technical skills

We'll assess you against these technical skills during the selection process:

• Technical Design throughout the Lifecycle
• Problem Definition and Shaping

Alongside your salary of £69,500, Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office contributes £20,134 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides (opens in a new window).

We understand that people are at the heart of our success. We promote and encourage all our staff to follow continued professional development, offering our staff access to a range of learning and development opportunities

• A culture encouraging inclusion and diversity
• A Civil Service pension with an average employer contribution of 28.97%
• Working patterns to support work/life balance such as job sharing, term-time working, flexi-time and compressed hours.
• Work that directly enables UK national security
• The satisfaction of keeping critical infrastructure running for users who depend on it
• The pride of supporting the most sensitive work government does -and knowing it depends on you
• 25 days annual leave (rising to 30), Civil Service pension, genuine flexibility
• A pathway to shaping the future for working at SECRET for HMG

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence can be a useful tool to support your application, however, all examples and statements provided must be truthful, factually accurate and taken directly from your own experience. Where plagiarism has been identified (presenting the ideas and experiences of others, or generated by artificial intelligence, as your own) applications may be withdrawn and internal candidates may be subject to disciplinary action. Please see our candidate guidance (opens in a new window) for more information on appropriate and inappropriate use.

Selection process details

This vacancy is using Success Profiles (opens in a new window), and will assess your Behaviours, Experience and Technical skills.

Step 1.

Submit a CV outlining your employment history detailing your responsibilities, skills, accomplishments, plus your qualifications and relevant training. Please ensure you have provided reasons for any gaps within the last two years.

Step 2.

A Personal Statement of 750 words explaining how you consider your skills, qualities and experience to evidence your suitability for the role, focusing on the essential skills in the job profile.

These responses along with behaviours and technical skills will be explored further during the interview process for shortlisted candidates.

Step 3.

Additional Eligibility Questions. Answers to these questions will determine if you are eligible to apply.

Applications will be sifted anonymously so please remove any biographical data that would identify you.

As part of the online application process, you will be asked several diversity-related questions. If you do not wish to provide a declaration on any of the characteristics, you will have the option to select ‘prefer not to say’. The information you provide when submitting your application will help us monitor the Civil Service commitment to diversity and inclusion. You can refer to the Civil Service Diversity and Inclusion Strategy for more information.

You will receive an acknowledgment of your application through the online process.

Step 4.

For the interview, an assessment tool will be used in addition to the behaviours and technical skills listed. You will be given details of this prior to interview to prepare.

Feedback will only be provided if you attend an interview or assessment.