Student Loans Company
Senior Technical Architect
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Role Title: Senior Technical Architect
Salary: £61,950.00 - 72,952.00 GBP Annual + up to £10,000 DDAT Allowance per annum
Location: Glasgow, Darlington or Llandudno
Pension: A Civil Service Pension with an employer contribution of 28.97%
Advert Closing Date: Thursday 30 July 2026
Is it time you unlocked your potential?
Student Loans Company is a non-profit making Government-owned organisation to provide loans and grants to students in universities and colleges in the UK. Since 1989, we have enabled our customers to invest in their futures by delivering secure, accurate and efficient assessment, payment and repayment services.
Our Values
Culture is at the heart of everything we do at SLC and we are guided by our five values which help make SLC a great place to work:
- Honesty: We act with integrity and transparency, sharing information openly and addressing challenges with courage.
- Empowerment: We enable people to take initiative, make impactful decisions, and continuously learn and grow.
- Accountability: We deliver on commitments, own our successes and mistakes, and strive for quality outcomes.
- Respect: We value diverse perspectives, actively listen, and create an inclusive environment where everyone belongs.
- Trust: We collaborate across teams, build dependable relationships, and work as one to deliver for our customers.
These values are more than words—they guide our decisions, shape our collaborations, and strengthen our impact on the students we serve.
About the Role
As a Senior Technical Architect within SLC’s Architecture team, you’ll help shape and govern the organisation’s technical direction. You’ll define and refine architectures and designs that support major change programmes, ensuring they align with SLC’s principles, strategies, and enterprise roadmap. This includes working across a diverse application estate from Commercial Off the Shelf Solutions through to micro service-based platforms both on-prem and on cloud.
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You will also contribute to the development of technical roadmaps, lead design assurance activities, and promote innovation by exploring new technologies and approaches. Collaboration is central to the role - you’ll work closely with business and technical colleagues, communicate architectural designs to varied audiences, and support technical teams in their development.
What You Bring
- Ability to make architecture decisions while solving high risk architecture issues, assuring services against broader government standards, and managing architectural risks.
- Confident in translating complex technical concepts into non-technical language for senior stakeholders and presenting at various forums.
- Ability to work collaboratively in a group or team and actively network with others while using your initiative to identify problems or issues in the team dynamic and rectify them.
- Capacity to advocate or influence innovation initiatives and gain buy-in through collaboration with engineering, product and business teams.
- Evidence-based decision-making skills e.g. translation of PoC findings into actionable recommendations. Providing risk assessment and mitigation.
- Ability to assess maturity, risk, interoperability and sustainability of technologies while understanding and communicating complexity and architecture fit.
- A self-starting approach with the ability to work autonomously and collaboratively.
- Advanced proficiency in conceptual, logical, physical and semantic data modelling for operational and analytical systems.
- Experience in design and delivery of data pipelines using enterprise integration patterns and tooling from on-prem and cloud data sources to enterprise data warehouse and data lakehouse architecture.
- Experience working with software delivery partners in a multi-vendor environment, including pre-contract engagement, preparation of invitations to tender and tender evaluation.
- Experience and knowledge of design & delivery of data services from at least one of public cloud providers e.g. AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud.
- Experience of architecture design assurance and presentation at technical assurance board and architecture review board for information and approval.
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Benefits
You can expect more from a career with SLC. We support colleagues to unlock their potential through our Career Pathways development programme and offer an excellent benefit and rewards package that includes:
- 28 days annual leave plus 8 public holidays.
- Option to buy/sell annual leave.
- Flexi-time and enhanced flexible working options available.
- Option to join the Civil Service pension scheme.
- Life insurance cover for 4 x annual salary.
- Enhanced company sick pay and family leave including maternity, paternity and adoption.
- Contributory lifestyle benefit options including discounts at hundreds of retailers, cycle to work scheme, access to the Civil Service Sports and Leisure Club for discounted gym memberships, and an optional dental insurance scheme.
To find out what it’s like to work at Student Loans Company click here.
The Legal Bits
We’ll need you to confirm you have the right to work in the UK. If we offer you a job and you accept, there are some background checks we need to complete before you can start with us. This will include employment history, criminal record check, credit reference check and fraud check.
SLC are committed to ensuring our recruitment processes are inclusive for all candidates and will make reasonable adjustments for those who consider themselves to have a disability or long-term condition in line with the Equality Act 2010. Our application process provides candidates with the opportunity to request reasonable adjustments but if you would like to discuss this in more detail, please email ask_recruitment@slc.co.uk.
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