Head of Technical Architecture - SC Clearance Needed

Active or lapsed SC Clearance is essential for this role

We are looking for a Head of Technical Architecture to lead the design of secure, cloud-native products and platforms for a central government digital organisation.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role for someone who has designed and built real products, not a governance or enterprise architecture post. You will set the technical direction for services built on AWS, with a strong emphasis on serverless architecture and the use of Amazon Bedrock to bring generative AI into production safely. You will work closely with engineering, data science, security and product teams, and you will be the person who makes sure what gets built is secure, scalable and ready to be assured against government standards.

What you will be doing

• Leading technical and solution architecture across a portfolio of digital products, from early design through to live running.
• Designing serverless and event-driven solutions on AWS, and guiding teams on when and how to use managed services.
• Shaping the architecture for AI-enabled products using Amazon Bedrock, including model selection, data flows, guardrails and cost.
• Working with data scientists to take models and analytics applications from prototype into secure, supportable production services.
• Embedding Secure by Design from the start, and making sure services can be assessed against the NCSC Cyber Assessment Framework and wider national cyber security policy.
• Setting standards for CI/CD, infrastructure as code and DevOps ways of working so teams can release safely and often.
• Leading and developing a team of architects, and representing architecture with senior stakeholders and assurance boards.

What we are looking for

• A technical or solutions architect by background who has designed and built digital products. This is not an enterprise architecture role.
• Deep AWS experience, particularly serverless (for example Lambda, API Gateway, Step Functions, DynamoDB, EventBridge).
• Hands-on experience of Amazon Bedrock or comparable generative AI services in a production setting.
• Some data science or machine learning exposure, enough to work credibly with data science teams and architect for their needs.
• Strong secure cloud architecture skills, with working knowledge of Secure by Design, the NCSC Cyber Assessment Framework and UK national cyber security policy.
• A solid grounding in CI/CD, DevOps and infrastructure as code.
• Experience leading architects or engineers and influencing at senior level.
• Government or other regulated sector experience is helpful.