Solution Architect, NTT DATA

• If you’ve delivered systems for organisations such as the Home Office, Ministry of Justice or Ministry of Defence, fantastic; we also welcome candidates with transferable experience from complex, regulated environments
• Think in systems, design for change and make evidence-based trade-offs
• Are comfortable moving between strategy and hands-on detail
• Excel in stakeholder engagement and management across policy, operations and technology
• Collaborate openly in multi-supplier environments
• Keep users, security and operability front and centre, and write things down (standards, ADRs, risks, diagrams)
• Experience delivering national scale systems and services, ideally with departments such as the Home Office, MoJ or MoD
• Broad expertise across integration and messaging, digital services, case management, data integration, with up-to-date awareness of emerging approaches
• Strong knowledge of cloud-based services and cloud-native solutions on at least one major platform (Azure preferred; AWS/GCP also valued)
• Common services: containers/Kubernetes/OpenShift, serverless (e.g., Azure Functions), networking, identity, storage, and IaC; automation and cost optimisation
• Designing modern application architectures: microservices, event-driven and API-led
• .NET/C#, ASP.NET Core, Web APIs, gRPC; API management; messaging/streaming (e.g., Kafka, Service Bus, Event Hubs); contracts and documentation (OpenAPI/Swagger)
• Familiarity with front-end integration patterns and modern SPAs (e.g., React) is a bonus
• Selecting appropriate persistence: relational (e.g., SQL Server, PostgreSQL), NoSQL (e.g., Cosmos DB, DynamoDB), caching (e.g., Redis)
• Data integration, quality, lineage and privacy-by-design
• CI/CD (Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions or GitLab), Git, automated testing, security scanning, containers and infrastructure as code
• Observability: logging, metrics, tracing, SLO/SLA thinking; designing for operability and support
• Delivering solutions with strict security controls, including environments where external security assurance is mandated
• Building security into designs (threat modelling, identity and access, secrets management, encryption in transit/at rest)
• Clear modelling and communication (C4/UML), option analysis and trade-off records
• Creating architecture roadmaps and contributing to business cases
• Significant experience designing and delivering complex, distributed systems (typically 5+ years in architecture or senior engineering)
• Strong understanding of the full software delivery lifecycle and agile methods
• Must hold current SC or be SC-clearable (generally five years’ UK residency)
• A relevant degree is welcome but not required; equivalent professional experience is valued
• You don’t need everything here; if you have most of it (or strong potential to learn), we’d love to hear from you

Desirable

• We’re hiring experienced, pragmatic and collaborative Solution Architects to shape and deliver national-scale digital, data and technology services across UK government
• You’ll work with multi-disciplinary agile teams, make smart architectural decisions, and help our customers deliver secure, reliable and user-centred services in the cloud
• While we work polyglot, this role leans .NET/C# to support upcoming programmes
• You may embed within an agile team or lead across several squads
• You'll provide hands-on technical leadership to design and deliver secure, resilient solutions
• Shape the architecture for new products and programmes, selecting fit-for-purpose approaches and technologies
• Lead solution design across domains (applications, data, integration, cloud, security), creating clear roadmaps and decision records
• Balance user needs, value, cost and risk with product, delivery and engineering peers
• Communicate complex topics clearly, from the C-suite to engineers, and build trusted relationships with senior stakeholders
• Guide engineering practices (CI/CD, testability, operability, observability) to reduce risk and increase delivery velocity
• Contribute to bids and estimates, aligning solutions to public sector standards and constraints
• Champion governance and assurance aligned to GDS, NCSC guidance and the Technology Code of Practice (where applicable)