Lead Technical Architect - MoJ - G6

Location

East Midlands (England), East of England, London (region), North East England, North West England, Scotland, South East England, South West England, Wales, West Midlands (England), Yorkshire and the Humber

About the job

Job summary

This position is based Nationally

Job description

Lead Technical Architect 

Location: National* 

Closing Date: 19th October 2025 

Interviews: w/c 3rd November 2025 

Grade: 6 

(MoJ candidates who are on a specialist grade, will be able to retain this grade on lateral transfer) 

Salary: London: £75,674 – £87,875 (which may include an allowance of up to £12,201) 

National: £71,381 – £83,700 (which may include an allowance of up to £12,319) 

Working Pattern: Full-time/Part-time/Flexible Working 

Contract Type: Permanent 

Vacancy number: 10597 

*We offer a hybrid working model, allowing for a balance between remote work and time spent in your local office. Office locations can be found ON THIS MAP 

The Role 

We’re recruiting for a Lead Technical Architect here at Justice Digital, to be part of our warm and collaborative Legal Aid Agency (LAA) team. Our lead architects are responsible for assuring, designing, and delivering digital services that make a genuine difference to people’s lives. Together we will collaborate to develop our strategy, connect people and build trust with clear communication, and provide empathetic technical leadership across diverse teams. 

This role aligns against Lead Techincal Architect from the Government Digital and Data Framework 

Our Lead Technical Architects will work to understand our technology, our business, and our people (colleagues, stakeholders, and users of our services), and to create an ambitious and pragmatic vision for our teams, using their technical expertise to bring our challenges and opportunities into focus alongside the views of other professions in our leadership team.    

A Lead Technical Architect can see the big picture, understanding our complex technology landscape, and can clearly and effectively communicate that big picture by building trust, developing great relationships, and empathising with others.  They provide mentoring and support to other architects and engineering leadership in their service area, and they have a good understanding of a broad range of technologies, with experience in both software engineering and commercial enterprise, as well as providing effective governance, both within our organisation, and across our suppliers.    

We are a flexible organisation and we understand that people can't always work 5 days a week or might have responsibilities that sometimes clash with standard office hours. We work as flexibly as we can, including offering part time hours, so if in doubt please do get in touch. If you're the right candidate we will do our best to work around you.  

To help picture your life at MoJ Justice Digital please take a look at our blog and our Digital and Technology strategy 2025 

Key Responsibilities: 

Collaborate with the Principal Technical Architect to create a technical vision for Legal Aid develop our strategy, and be accountable for our technology estate as a whole.  

Communicate about our technology across teams and professions, both within our Digital unit and across all parts of the Ministry of Justice; seeing the big picture, and bringing it to all stakeholders. 

Advocate for a diverse, inclusive culture across the engineering community, growing awareness, inclusivity, and balance, including being a champion for increasing women and minorities in our workforce.  

Collaborate and find agreement with senior stakeholders, providing both technical and non-technical direction and challenge, as well as pragmatic compromise to deliver value.  

Mentor, coach, line-manage, and recruit more great technical architects and engineering leadership, helping build a sustainable work force plan to deliver our strategy.  

Create structured analysis of technical concepts, providing insight for multi-disciplinary decision-making, whilst seeking opportunities to collaborate and reuse common components.  

Empower teams to make pragmatic and incremental change, through influence and inspiration, setting both a vision for the future and an empathetic path that people and teams will be able to follow.  

Guide and influence choices to align with strategy, and seek out opportunities for digital transformation, helping all understand the value of technical decisions.  

Engage with our portfolio, assurance, risk management, cyber, and information assurance leadership to ensure their priorities are represented alongside those of the business and other digital teams. 

Our Tech Stack  

This is our tech, both strategic and legacy.  You don’t need to have experience with all of these, but we hope you see some familiar things. 

Modern strategic software built in Ruby, Java, and Python. 

Public GitHub repositories for our work. 

Resilient infrastructure in the cloud (primarily AWS), using infrastructure as code (IaC) and platforms as a service (PaaS). 

Progressive software development practices such as Domain-Driven Design (DDD), test-driven development (TDD), continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD). 

A new multi-tier architecture, creating central data and business logic platforms to accelerate our product development. 

Enterprise Oracle software, including Enterprise Resource Planning (E-Business Suite). 

Mac laptops for delivering our work. 

If this feels like an exciting challenge, something you are enthusiastic about, and want to join our team please read on and apply! 

Benefits 

37 hours per week and flexible working options including working from home, working part-time, job sharing, or working compressed hours. 

A £1k per person learning budget is in place to support all our people, with access to best in class conferences and seminars, accreditation with professional bodies, fully funded vocational programmes and e-learning platforms  

Staff have 10% time to dedicate to develop & grow 

Generous civil service pension based on defined benefit scheme, with employer contributions of 28.97% from April 1st 2024 (Contribution Rates) 

25 days leave (plus bank holidays) and 1 privilege day usually taken around the Kings’ birthday. 5 additional days of leave once you have reached 5 years of service. 

Compassionate maternity, adoption, and shared parental leave policies, with up to 26 weeks leave at full pay, 13 weeks with partial pay, and 13 weeks further leave. And maternity support/paternity leave at full pay for 2 weeks, too! 

Wellbeing support including access to the Calm app.  

Nurturing professional and interpersonal networks including those for Carers & Childcare, Gender Equality, PROUD and SPIRIT 

Bike loans up to £2500 and secure bike parking (subject to availability and location) 

Season ticket loans, childcare vouchers and eye-care vouchers. 

5 days volunteering paid leave. 

Some offices may have a subsidised onsite Gym. 

Person Specification 

Essential 

Demonstrated experience in a technical, solution, or infrastructure architecture role, with a background in either software engineering or enterprise architecture, acting as a recognised expert to guide, critique, and support teams.   

Excellent communication skills, with the ability to distil complex and nuanced information into clear, concise messaging at all levels, from specialist developers through to non-technical executive leadership.   

Ability to see the “big picture” across multidisciplinary teams, the organisation as a whole, including views of other professions, and the ability to explain the big picture to all professions at all levels, ensuring mutual understanding and trust.  

Experience in building and executing strategy to reduce the risks posed by legacy services whilst simultaneously enabling delivery of new transformative, user-centred services.  

Experience in designing software architecture, including multi-tier web applications, micro services, API management, data persistence technologies, and event-driven architecture in public cloud environments.   

Experience in introducing and championing best practices such as agile development, domain-driven design (DDD), test-driven development (TDD), continuous integration (CI), continuous delivery (CD), and DevOps, fostering high-quality engineering culture within teams.  

Experience assuring services in a complex technical estate through effective risk management and technical governance, both within your own teams and across commercial engagements with third parties.  

Ability to understand the current state of the technology, the organisation, and people as a whole, to make iterative, outcome-focused, and effective change towards a strategic vision. 

Willingness to be assessed against  the requirements for SC clearance 

We welcome the unique contribution diverse applicants bring and do not discriminate based on culture, ethnicity, race, nationality or national origin, age, sex, gender identity or expression, religion or belief, disability status, sexual orientation, educational or social background or any other factor.     

Our values are Purpose, Humanity Openness and Together. Find out more here about how we celebrate diversity and an inclusive culture in our workplace.     

The Civil Service is committed to attract, retain and invest in talent wherever it is found. To learn more please see the Civil Service People Plan and the Civil Service D&I Strategy. 

How to Apply 

Candidates must submit CV and Statement of Suitability (750 words max) which describes how you meet the requirements set out in the Person Specification above. 

Application Guidance 

Please access the following link for guidance on how to apply and how to complete a Personal Statement  

Application Guidance 

In Justice Digital, we recruit using a combination of the Government Digital and Data Profession Capability and Success Profiles Frameworks. We will assess your Experience, Technical Skills and the following Behaviours during the assessment process: 

Leadership  

Communicating and Influencing  

Seeing the Big Picture  

Making Effective Decisions 

A diverse panel will review your application against the Person Specification above.   

Successful candidates who meet the required standard will then be invited to a 90-minute panel interview, which may include a presentation and technical exercise, held via video conference. 

Should we receive a high volume of applications, a pre-sift based on “Demonstrated experience in a technical, solution, or infrastructure architecture role, with a background in either software engineering or enterprise architecture, acting as a recognised expert to guide, critique, and support teams” and “Experience in designing software architecture, including multi-tier web applications, micro services, API management, data persistence technologies, and event-driven architecture in public cloud environments” will be conducted before the sift.  

The panel will be conducting a sift on the following criteria from the Person Specification above, in addition to the criteria also being assessed at pre-sift: 

“Excellent communication skills, with the ability to distil complex and nuanced information into clear, concise messaging at all levels, from specialist developers through to non-technical executive leadership.” 

Candidates who do not demonstrate examples/details of their experience of the requirements stated under the Person Specification above in their Cover Letter will be rejected on this basis. 

Should you be unsuccessful in the role that you have applied for but demonstrate the capability for a role at a lower level, we reserve the right to discuss this opportunity with you and offer you the position without needing a further application. 

A reserve list may be held for up to 12 months, from which further appointments may be made. 

Use of 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 for more information on appropriate and inappropriate use. 

Terms & Conditions 

Please review our Terms and Conditions which set out how we recruit and provide further information related to the role and salary arrangements. 

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact digitalanddatarecruitment@justice.gov.uk

Person specification

Please refer to the attached Job Description