Lead Architect (Ref: 18558)

DSIT • Full-time • United Kingdom • £71.38k - £85.26k / year • 5d ago

The Role

We’re recruiting for Lead Architects here at Justice Digital, to be part of our warm and collaborative teams within the Legal Aid Agency. Our lead architects are responsible for assuring, designing, and delivering digital services that make a genuine difference to people’s lives. A Lead Architect will work alongside a service owner, overseeing the work of up to 10 engineering teams. Together we will collaborate to develop our strategy, connect people and build trust with clear communication, and provide empathetic technical leadership across diverse teams.

This role aligns against the Lead Technical Architect Role from the Government Digital and Data Framework.

Our Lead Architects 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 their technical expertise to bring our challenges and opportunities into focus alongside the views of other professions in our leadership team.

In LAA Digital 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 co-designing the social and technical dimensions together, and who bring both technical depth and organisational awareness to their work.

This role requires clear communication and structured thinking skills. A Lead Architect can see the big picture, understanding our complex technology landscape, and can clearly and effectively communicate with both specialist and non-specialist audiences.

By building trust, developing great relationships, and empathising with others you will support the development of the architecture community and engineering leadership within your service area, providing guidance, mentorship, and technical leadership across teams.

A Lead Architect will have a good understanding of a broad range of technologies, with hands on experience in both software engineering and commercial enterprise, as well as providing effective governance, both within our organisation, and across our suppliers.

You’ll receive a range of excellent benefits when you join our department, including:

A generous employer pension contribution of 28.97% through the Civil Service Pension Scheme.
25 days of annual leave, (increasing to 30 days once you have reached 5 years of service), plus 8 bank holidays and a privilege day for the King’s birthday.
Flexible working arrangements including hybrid working, working part time or compressed hours. Designed to support a positive work–life balance.
Employees are allocated 10% of their working time for personal and professional development.
A £1k per person learning budget is in place to support all our people, with access to best-in-class conferences and seminars, accreditation with professional bodies, fully funded vocational programmes and e-learning platforms.
Compassionate maternity, adoption, and shared parental leave policies, with up to 26 weeks leave at full pay, 13 weeks with partial pay, and 13 weeks further leave. And maternity support/paternity leave at full pay for 2 weeks, too!

You can find more details of the Benefits we offer here. To help picture your life at MoJ Justice Digital, Data and Science please take a look at our blog.

Key Responsibilities

Create a technical vision for Legal Aid, develop our strategy, and be accountable for our technology estate as part of our Architect Leadership Team.
Communicate about our technology across teams and professions, not just within our Digital unit but across all parts of the Ministry of Justice and with our suppliers and partners; 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.
Maintain a holistic view of the end-to-end service ecosystem within Legal Aid, identifying technical dependencies and risks, actively seeking opportunities for improvement and collaboration, and ensuring we as a profession are actively producing, maintaining, and owning the associated enterprise architecture documentation.
Empower teams to make pragmatic and incremental change, through influence and inspiration, setting both a vision for the future and an empathetic path that people and teams will be able to follow.
Guide and influence choices to align with strategy, and seek out opportunities for digital transformation, helping all understand the value of technical decisions.
Engage with our portfolio, assurance, risk management, cyber, and information assurance leadership to ensure their priorities are represented alongside those of the business and other digital teams.
Mentor, coach, line-manage, and recruit more great architects and engineering leadership, helping build a sustainable work force plan to deliver our strategy.
Champion inclusive working practices and support efforts to grow diversity, inclusivity and balance across engineering roles.
Run community-of-practice initiatives within the architecture and engineering functions.
Promote open dialogue, collaborative problem solving, and continuous learning within our technical community.

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