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A lead security architect works on services of high complexity and risk, making decisions to enable the business to achieve its needs. At this role level, you will: Work across projects with high strategic impact, setting a strategy that can be used in the long term and across the breadth of the organisation. Communicate with a broad range of senior stakeholders and be responsible for defining the vision, principles and strategy for security architecture. Recommend security design across all DWP projects and technologies. Have a deep and evolving level of technical expertise, so you can act as an exemplar. Make and influence important business and architectural decisions. Research, identify, validate and adopt new technologies and methodologies. Be a recognised expert and demonstrate this expertise by solving unprecedented issues and problems. Further the profession, demonstrating and sharing best practice within and outside the organisation. Please note: As part of the role, you may be required to travel to the other digital hubs. The frequency of this will be discussed further, should you be successful.

As Principal Technical Architect, you will define and execute the technical strategy for your responsibility, collaborating with senior leadership and diverse teams to ensure alignment with organizational, cross-departmental, and government-wide objectives. You will proactively seek opportunities to leverage emerging technologies - such as cloud and AI - and ensure that technical solutions are secure, user-focused, and capable of adapting to evolving business needs. You will lead the design and review processes for complex systems and infrastructure, championing architectural best practices and governance. By bridging technical and business perspectives, you will resolve high-risk issues and shape initiatives that drive transformation. Your role includes guiding and inspiring other architects, facilitating professional growth, and establishing an environment where innovative thinking thrives. Key responsibilities: Own and deliver the overarching technical strategy, guiding architectural decisions that balance risk, complexity, and delivery timelines. Lead governance and assurance processes, ensuring solutions remain secure, robust, and aligned with enterprise architecture principles. Collaborate with senior stakeholders to advocate for digital transformation initiatives, influencing decisions through clear, data-driven insights. Mentor and guide architects and engineering teams, nurturing a culture of excellence, innovation, and continuous learning. Oversee integration of new systems, developing detailed plans that align with broader organisational and cross-government strategies. Assess current systems to identify areas for improvement, analyse potential risks, and promote emerging best practices in the field. Facilitate stakeholder discussions, serving as the key escalation point for complex or high-risk design challenges. Drive continuous improvement, incorporating lessons learned into future strategies and ensuring consistency in architecture across multiple domains. The successful candidate will need to be adaptable and willing to work flexibly across the wider team as required, performing additional duties reasonably expected within the scope of the grade. Line Management You will manage a team, providing timely feedback, leadership and help in developing their capability and career, supporting and empowering staff to achieve their best potential, aspiring to make HOD an inclusive, enjoyable, and diverse team to work within whilst facilitating development as an individual. Travel Occasional travel may be required to other work locations within the UK according to business needs and may include overnight stays. All related costs will be reimbursed in line with Home Office policy. Working Pattern This role is available on a full-time basis with the option of working. This role is also suitable for working hours, with a minimum requirement to work 4 days / 28 hours per week due to business requirements.

Architecture and technology leadership are crucial to MI5’s ability to move at pace and deliver the strategic technology change we need to stay ahead. We need technology leaders to help set and deliver our ambitious technology strategy. We are moving into a product-centred organisation and, as we evolve in this direction, we need senior technologists to help us develop our capabilities, ensuring we make the best use of recent innovations in technology while also pushing these boundaries even further with our internal engineering teams. MI5 makes use of modern approaches and cloud technologies such as AWS and Azure, as well as on-premises platforms and long-established technologies and frameworks. The role involves leading and managing technical architecture at both the product and product-group level, including the delivery and prototyping of new, secure, scalable, and robust capabilities. It also includes owning and managing technical risk for the product groups you’re accountable for, while supporting our product teams in their technical decisions and designs. A key part of the role is setting the strategic direction for our products and technologies, guiding decisions on the future of products, platforms or services, and enabling the decommissioning of legacy ones. Working closely with engineers and senior stakeholders, you’ll ensure alignment of vision and act as a force multiplier to increase delivery pace, manage technical and compliance risk, and maintain coherence across the organisation’s wider product landscape. This helps to ensure systems work effectively together and that capability investments deliver maximum value. Bridging the gap between technical and non-technical stakeholders, you’ll work with a range of technical specialists, including engineers, product professionals, and senior mission stakeholders, to make decisions on risk and technology strategy. You’ll also share the collective responsibility for keeping the country safe and demonstrate a commitment to continually developing yourself and others. Providing the appropriate level of support, leadership and direction where required to aid the development and growth of others, taking various forms including coaching and mentoring across the technical community. You’ll also bring constructive challenge, respecting the views and experience of colleagues while ensuring the right approaches, guardrails, standards, policies and governance are in place across the delivery lifecycle. Technical architects tend to be ‘T’-shaped, meaning they maintain both broad technical knowledge and one or more technical specialism, in depth. These specialisms may include software development, data architecture, security, cloud technologies and others. MI5’s architecture community (guild) is supportive and inclusive. It is responsible for designing and delivering real-world architectural solutions to strategic requirements from a range of business areas across the organisation and partner agencies. Whether delivering a platform for analysing data systems to support investigations, providing compliance services that ensure legal operation, or developing tools that enhance developer experience, the work presents unique and fascinating challenges. Due to the nature of our work, most teams are office based. Limited opportunities to work from home may be available, but these are not guaranteed and depend on the business need.

The key responsibilities of the Lead Technical Architect are to: Provide technical leadership in a multi-team environment and using varied solution development lifecycles. Challenge entrenched practices Define clearly as-is and to-be architectures proportionate to the requirements of the team and environment. Be responsible for leading the technical design of systems and services, justifying and communicating design decisions Assure other services and system quality, ensuring the technical work fits into the broader strategy for government Explore the benefits of cross-government alignment where feasible Support the development of architectural patterns and roadmaps specific to the projects or services being worked on Contribute to reference architecture models and repository. Provide effective impact assessment of change proposals. Ensure projects and programmes are compliant with strategy and architecture. Assess and communicate the value of the project/programme architecture. In delivering these responsibilities you will be expected to: Build effective relations and engagement with senior management. Provide or oversee the provision of effective technical advice to multiple teams ensuring that solutions adhere to accepted architectural principles. Articulate to a professional standard complex technical idea in clear, informative and accessible language, tailored as necessary for the intended audience. Utilise appropriate methods, techniques and tools for planning, organising, resourcing, directing, co-ordinating and monitoring ongoing activities.

The key responsibilities and deliverables for this post are working with your UKEF colleagues and customers to ensure that UKEF is able to meet evolving customer demand using a secure, scalable and robust enterprise architecture blueprint. The main activities of your role will be: Designing secure systems - you can design and review system architectures through the development of patterns and principles. Security technology - you can demonstrate strong knowledge of system architectures. You can understand and articulate the impact of vulnerabilities on existing and future designs and systems, and how easy or difficult it will be to exploit these vulnerabilities. You can be recognised as an expert by peers in the broader security industry. Communicating between the technical and non-technical - you can identify the needs of business and technical stakeholders. You can effectively manage stakeholder expectations. You can demonstrate excellent communication skills and can manage difficult conversations or negotiations. Making and guiding decisions - you can make decisions characterised by managed levels of risk and complexity and recommend decisions as risk and complexity increase. You can resolve technical disputes between wider peers and indirect stakeholders, considering all views and opinions. Strategy - you can apply strategy, using and challenging patterns, standards, policies, roadmaps and vision statements. You can provide guidance. Turning business problems into secure technical designs - you can design systems characterised by high levels of risk, impact, and business or technical complexity. You can simultaneously work across multiple services or a single large or complicated service. Understanding the whole context - you can understand trends and practices outside your team and how these will impact your work. You can see how your work fits into the broader strategy and historical context. You can consider the patterns and interactions on a larger scale. The public core of the internet - you will have detailed and extensive experience of naming and numbering systems, cryptographic mechanisms, packet routing and common protocols and how the domain name system (DNS) works You will also have detailed and extensive expertise of at least two of the following: managing domains for a large, distributed and federated organisation how domains are used to support internet services and their security different ways that a domain vulnerability can be exploited, and how to prevent them developing tools that interact with domain records This list is not exhaustive, and you may be required to carry out additional duties according to business needs.