Senior Technical Architect - MoJ - G7

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

Senior Technical Architect 

Location: National*  

Closing Date: 19th October 

Interviews: Expected w/c 3rd November 

Grade: 7 

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

Salary: London: £63,343- £78,225 (which may include an allowance up to £14,882) 

National: £58,511- £73,450 (which may include an allowance up to £14,939) 

Working pattern: full-time, part-time, flexible working  

Contract Type: Permanent 

Vacancy number: 10650 

*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 Senior Technical Architect here at Justice Digital, to be part of our warm and collaborative Legal Aid Agency team. 

This role aligns against the senior architect role from the Government Digital and Data Framework 

Our Senior Technical Architects are responsible for assuring, designing, and delivering digital services that enable both the public and legal professionals to apply and claim for legal aid.   

You will be working with developers, SRE and security experts, user researchers, product managers, designers, delivery managers, and content specialists who share a vision for improving government through smarter use of technology. You will collaborate to develop our strategy, connect people and build trust with clear communication, and provide empathetic technical leadership across diverse product teams.    

Our Senior 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 Senior 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.   

As a Senior Technical Architect, your days will be varied. For example, you might be creating diagrams and data flows for replacing a legacy service; working directly with developers to ensure their services are robust and secure; supporting a new delivery manager to introduce or improve ways of working; or liaising with engineering leadership to develop guardrails and patterns for use across the department.  

We are looking for people who will encourage open discussion and build the architecture community within the Ministry of Justice and the Legal Aid Agency in particular. You should have a mindset for growth and learning, constantly looking for emerging technologies, tools and good practice.  

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 Lead Technical Architect to create a technical vision for Legal Aid, develop our strategy and be accountable for our technology estate. 

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. 

Collaborate and find agreement with senior stakeholders, providing both technical and non-technical direction and challenge, as well as pragmatic compromise to deliver value across your teams and the service area.  

Create structured analysis of technical concepts, providing insight for multi-disciplinary decision-making, whilst seeking opportunities to collaborate and develop patterns and guidelines for the Digital Unit. 

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 priorities, such as Secure by Design, are represented alongside those of the business and other digital teams. 

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. 

Mentor, coach, line-manage, and help recruit more great technical architects and engineering leadership. 

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 

Does this sound like a role that meets your requirements? If this feels like an exciting challenge, something you are enthusiastic about, and you want to join our team please read on.  

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 

Even if you don't feel that you can say yes to every single point, we still encourage you to apply.  We're eager to meet people with a drive and energy to implement our technical strategy - not just candidates who check all our boxes.

Experience as a software engineer, cloud engineer, or software architect, delivering digital products on the web.- sift 

Experience of different levels of the web stack, such as frontend and backend, API management, micro services, databases, and event driven architectures in public cloud environments.- sift 

Experience of making and guiding effective technical decisions by understanding the wider context. 

Strong communication and influencing skills, with the ability to explain complex technical information clearly and concisely to a range of audiences, from developers and engineers to senior non-technical colleagues, and to build trust, negotiate, and persuade stakeholders to achieve shared outcomes.  

Able to identify and mitigate security risks when designing and operating in a public cloud environment or helping teams to uphold standards of security, quality, and operational resilience, while meeting the needs of stakeholders and live service users. 

Experience of introducing and championing best practices such as TDD, continuous integration, continuous delivery, and DevOps across more than one team. 

Remember, even if you think that your experience does not cover all these criteria, we still want to hear from you. 

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 a CV and a cover letter with a maximum of 750 words, which describes how your skills and experience, meet the requirements set out in the below criteria:

Experience as a software engineer, cloud engineer, or software architect, delivering digital products on the web. 

Experience of different levels of the web stack, such as frontend and backend, API management, micro services, databases, and event driven architectures in public cloud environments. 

Strong communication and influencing skills, with the ability to explain complex technical information clearly and concisely to a range of audiences, from developers and engineers to senior non-technical colleagues, and to build trust, negotiate, and persuade stakeholders to achieve shared outcomes. 

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: 

Changing and Improving 

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 1-hour panel interview, which will include an ‘in interview’ technical exercises, held via video conference. 

Should we receive a high volume of applications, a pre-sift based on: ‘Experience as a software engineer, cloud engineer, or software architect, delivering digital products on the web’ will be conducted before the sift. 

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