Solution Architect

On behalf of FCDO, we are looking for a Solution Architect (Inside IR35) for a 6 Month hybrid contract 3 days per week based in East Kilbride.

Note: SC Clearance is an essential requirement for this role, as a minimum you must be willing & eligible to undergo checks. Please note, due to the exceptional requirements of this position, (and speed at which we require a postholder in situ), preference may be given to candidates who meet all of the essential criteria and hold active security clearance

We are recruiting for a hands-on solution architect to lead the technical design of a modern and innovative secure IT platform. This shared service platform plays a critical role in protecting some of the UK government's most sensitive information.

The Solution Architect plays a strategic leadership role in shaping and assuring the technical architecture across large programmes and critical business areas. This role is pivotal in ensuring architectural coherence, governance, and alignment with organisational objectives, while enabling delivery teams to build secure, scalable, and sustainable solutions.

Key Responsibilties

Architectural Oversight & Leadership
. Provide architectural leadership across multiple programmes and complex domains.
. Oversee the technical delivery of solutions, ensuring alignment with enterprise architecture principles and strategic goals.
. Lead and mentor solution architects, fostering a culture of architectural excellence and continuous improvement.
. Act as the final escalation point for architectural decisions, balancing risk, impact, and complexity.

High-Level Design Creation & Review
. Define and assure high-level solution designs that meet business and technical requirements.
. Review and approve architecture artefacts, ensuring they are fit for purpose and adhere to standards.
. Guide teams in applying architectural patterns, principles, and best practices throughout the solution life cycle.
. Ensure traceability between business requirements and technical designs.

Business-as-Usual Architecture Activities
. Lead the development and maintenance of architecture governance frameworks, including decision-making processes and assurance models.
. Create and maintain reusable architecture templates, standards, and reference models.
. Collaborate with stakeholders to ensure architectural compliance with internal policies, external regulations, and strategic objectives.
. Contribute to the evolution of enterprise architecture through feedback, lessons learned, and emerging trends.

Essential
. Stakeholder Management: You will have proven ability to lead and influence stakeholders across multiple disciplines, crafting and advocating for long-term technical vision aligned with business strategy. This will include experience of interacting with, and influencing, senior stakeholders and a wide range of people across large teams, departments, suppliers, and customers.
. Delivery: You will have practical hands-on experience in technical and solution architecture and design including within programmes, projects, or a product-centric organisation, across agile and waterfall methodologies.
. Technology Expertise: You will have a good understanding of a broad range of industry-standard technologies, both proprietary and open source, across a diverse range of Microsoft and Linux-based deployments, across physical, virtual, and containerised compute.
. Software & Infrastructure Expertise: You will have a good understanding of both software and infrastructure design considerations and be comfortable working with engineers to understand and guide the datacentre environment that applications are deployed into.
. Architecture Leadership: You will have deep experience in working in an architecture function and leading the development of the vision, principles, and strategy for architects for a set of products, projects, and technologies. You will be practised in creating technical standards, blueprints, reference architectures, roadmaps, transition states and target solutions across multiple services.
. Cloud Expertise: Experience designing and implementing cloud solutions across major providers (eg Azure, AWS, GCP, Oracle) Expertise in navigating platform-specific features and optimising and automating (IaC) deployments for maximum security, performance, and cost-effectiveness. Strong understanding of cloud governance models and compliance frameworks relevant to government environments.

Desirable
. On-Premise Classified Environments: Extensive experience architecting and securing solutions within highly sensitive and classified environments, including familiarity with relevant security policies, regulations, and best practices.
. Zero Trust: Deep understanding of zero trust principles and their application in designing secure architectures, including experience with identity-based access control, micro-segmentation, and data encryption.
. Secure by Design: Proven track record of incorporating security considerations into all phases of the solution design life cycle, ensuring compliance with relevant security standards and regulations.
. Identity & Access Management: In-depth experience with identity and access management solutions, including privileged access management, and ability to architect secure authentication and authorisation mechanisms.
. Software Defined Data Centres: Experience with software-defined networking, storage, and compute solutions, including virtualization technologies and their implementation in government data centres.

Please be aware that this role can only be worked within the UK and not Overseas.

In applying for this role, you acknowledge the following "this role falls in scope of the Off Payroll Working in the Public Sector legislation. Any rates of payment quoted will reflect the gross rate per day for the assignment and will be subject to appropriate taxes and statutory costs. As such the payment to the intermediary and your income resulting from this contract will be different".