Senior Technical Architect - Ministry of Justice - 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

The Role

Please note this role requires you to pass Security Check clearance. Please click on the link for details.

We're recruiting for Senior Technical Architects here at Justice Digital, Data and Science to be part of our warm and collaborative Legal Aid Agency team.

This role aligns against Senior Technical Architect from the Government Digital and Data Framework

We believe that architecture is not purely a technical discipline. The systems we build are shaped by the teams that build them, the organisational structures they sit within, and the communication patterns between the people involved. Our architects think about how team structures, domain boundaries, and organisational dynamics shape systems - and how the systems we design, in turn, shape the organisation. We are looking for people who understand that designing great systems means considering the social and technical dimensions together, and who bring both technical depth and organisational awareness to their work.

You will be working with developers, Site Reliability Engineers 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. Together we will collaborate to develop our strategy, connect people and build trust with clear communication, and provide empathetic technical leadership across diverse product teams.

You 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 your 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 the organisational landscape that produces it. You can clearly and effectively communicate that big picture by building trust, developing great relationships, and empathising with others. You provide mentoring and support to other architects and engineering leadership. You have a good understanding of a broad range of technologies, combined with the ability to reason about how organisational structures and team designs affect what can and should be built.

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 take security seriously. You will work closely with the security engineers and architects embedded in our Legal Aid Agency team, and with our Cyber Security Team, to build services that are Secure by Design - considering security and data protection from the very start rather than bolting them on later. You don't need to be a security specialist; you need to treat security as part of good design and know when to bring our specialists in.

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.

Key Responsibilities

• Collaborate with Lead Technical Architects to create a technical vision for Legal Aid, develop our strategy, and be accountable for our technology estate.
• Ensure that team structures, domain boundaries, and technical architecture are aligned and support the flow of value - recognising that how we organise people shapes what we can build, and vice versa.
• Communicate about our technology and organisational landscape 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 and options, providing insight for multi-disciplinary decision-making and making or guiding proportionate architectural decisions with clear trade-offs, risks and rationale, using governance and assurance at the appropriate level.
• Create, guide and evolve technical designs for both new services and changes to existing services, working closely with engineers throughout delivery to maintain quality and architectural coherence as evidence, constraints and priorities change.
• Guide and influence choices in line with architecture strategy and organisational priorities, seeking opportunities for safe, incremental transformation and using evidence and feedback to evolve direction over time.
• Work closely with the LAA Cyber Security Team to help teams improve security across new, changing and legacy services, shifting security considerations earlier in architectural change, supporting threat modelling and structured security assessment, and helping teams make risk-based decisions and prioritise remediation.
• Engage with our portfolio, assurance, risk management, cyber, and information assurance leadership to ensure priorities 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. We're more interested in how you think about systems and organisations than in whether you've used a specific tool. You do need enough technical depth to reason about unfamiliar technologies, ask good questions, and work credibly with engineers.

• Modern strategic software built in Java, Python and Ruby
• 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
• Security built in by default through our LAA Secure by Design guardrails, with security engineers and architects embedded in the team to support you
• 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!