Solution Architect (Automation-Led) - 6 months - East Kilbride (Hybrid) - £800pd - DV Cleared

Solution Architect (Automation-Led) - 6 months - East Kilbride (Hybrid) - £800+ per day Inside IR35 - DV Clearance

A critical national infrastructure organisation is seeking a hands-on Solution Architect to lead the technical design of a modern, secure IT platform protecting some of the UK government's most sensitive information. This is not a hands-off, diagrams-only architecture role - you'll work directly with engineering teams, get into command-line tools and pipelines, and connect architectural decisions to real operability, automation and delivery outcomes. You'll act as the bridge between architecture and engineering, translating security and assurance requirements into practical technical solutions.

Key Responsibilities:

• Provide architectural leadership across multiple programmes and complex technical domains
• Define, assure and review high-level solution designs and architecture artefacts
• Shape and assure automation strategies across build, test, release and operations
• Review and challenge CI/CD pipelines, Infrastructure as Code and configuration-management approaches
• Support complex technical investigations, framing hypotheses and understanding cross-platform dependencies
• Ensure architecture decisions account for the full service life cycle - deployment, patching, monitoring, DR
• Lead governance frameworks, reusable templates and reference architectures
• Mentor solution architects and act as final escalation point for architectural decisions
• Collaborate with stakeholders to ensure compliance with internal policy and external regulation

Ideal Candidate:

• Practical hands-on experience in solution/technical architecture, comfortable at the command line and reviewing infrastructure code
• Strong automation and DevSecOps understanding - CI/CD, configuration management, IaC
• Practical experience with Terraform/CloudFormation-style IaC, including state, testing, policy and drift management
• Working knowledge of Git-based CI/CD platforms (GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, Jenkins)
• Configuration/Scripting ability across PowerShell, Python, Bash, Ansible
• Strong understanding of at least one major cloud platform plus hybrid/on-prem environments
• Good architectural understanding of containers and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes)
• Proven stakeholder management and ability to influence senior technical and non-technical audiences
• Experience creating technical standards, blueprints and reference architectures across multiple services

Desirable Experience:

• On-premise classified environment architecture and security accreditation
• Zero Trust principles, identity-based access control, micro-segmentation
• Identity & Access Management, including privileged access management
• Software-defined data centres and virtualisation in government environments

TL;DR
Job Title: Solution Architect (Automation-Led)
Contract Length: 6 months
Location: East Kilbride (Hybrid, ~3 days/week onsite)
Rate: £800+ per day
IR35 Status: Inside IR35
Start Date: ASAP
Clearance: DV