Technical Architect - One Login

Up to £89,880 (London) £79,094 (National)-Based on capability. The base salary of this grade is £61,005 for London and £55,403 for other locations.

Published on 29 October 2024. Deadline 24 November 2024.

As a GDS Technical Architect, you'll share the responsibility for the digital transformation of government. You'll ensure a project's overall technical design meets user needs and acceptance criteria, whilst conforming to time and budget constraints. You'll thrive using agile methods and enjoy working collaboratively with departments and multidisciplinary teams. Above all, you'll want to make government better, which may sometimes involve challenging the status quo.

As a Technical Architect, you'll:

• Design technical services or plan system integration, selecting necessary platforms and technologies to meet project requirements and user needs.
• Provide technical leadership and consultancy to both internal and external development teams, ensuring designs & solutions are fit for purpose, whilst meeting time and budget constraints.
• Build and maintain technical roadmaps, looking ahead for future opportunities or blockers, and ensuring decisions by development teams align with the strategy.
• Encourage communication across multiple development teams to identify strategic requirements and dependencies.
• Help develop services by contributing code, testing technologies and producing rapid prototypes.
• Be involved in the wider software engineering community, including cyber security and operations teams, identifying good practices to adopt and sharing your experiences, eg through blog posts, tech talks at conferences etc.
• Enable a positive technical culture, applying agile methods to development and completing quality assurance practices.
• Ensure delivery is aligned with the GDS Way and work with others across GDS to keep that up to date and relevant.
• Advise product managers on the estimated effort and technical implications of current user stories, as well as those in the backlog.

Person specification

We're interested in people who have:

• Leadership of team, management of outcome.
• Experience leading technical teams and delivering user-focused services.
• Awareness and understanding of a range of tech stacks and the ability to take a balanced approach to technology selection.
• Experience designing and building secure and scalable user-focused systems and an awareness of emerging security issues.
• Understanding of how to influence senior management and communicate with both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Understanding of agile environments, continual delivery techniques and devops cultures.
• Understanding of how governance works in agile, multidisciplinary team environments and be interested in forming government best practices, standards and policies.

If you meet a few of those criteria but think that you might not meet every last one then don't let that stop you from submitting an application.

The benefits of working at GDS

There are many benefits of working at GDS, including:

• Flexible hybrid working with flexi-time and the option to work part-time or condensed hours.
• A Civil Service Pension with an employer contribution of 28.97%.
• 25 days of annual leave, increasing by a day each year up to a maximum of 30 days.
• An extra day off for The King's birthday.
• An in-year bonus scheme to recognise high performance.
• Career progression and coaching, including a training budget for personal development.
• A focus on wellbeing with access to an employee assistance programme.
• Job satisfaction from making government services easier to use and more inclusive for people across the UK.
• Advances on pay, including for travel season tickets.
• Cycle to work scheme and facilities.
• Access to children's holiday play schemes across different locations in central London.
• Access to an employee discounts scheme.
• 10 learning days per year.
• Volunteering opportunities (5 special leave days per year).
• Access to a suite of learning activities through Civil Service learning.

GDS offers hybrid working for all employees. This means that everyone does some working from home and also spends some time in their local office. You'll agree to your hybrid working arrangement with your line manager in line with your preferences and business needs.

Things you need to know

The standard selection process for roles at GDS consists of:

• A simple application screening process - We only ask for a CV and cover letter of up to 750 words. Important tip - please ensure that your cover letter includes how you meet the skills and experience listed in the "person specification" section above.
• A 30 minute Phone Screening where you will be asked a few role-related questions to enable us to get to know you better (may not be required depending on the volume of applications).
• A 90 minutes face-to-face interview (conducted over video conferencing).

In order to assist candidates with this role, we will be holding a virtual recruitment event on Tuesday 12th of November at 10:30am to go through the role in more detail. If you are interested in joining this event please e-mail: and a member of the team will send you an invitation to the event.

Please note that this role requires SC clearance, which would normally need 5 years' UK residency in the past 5 years. This is not an absolute requirement, but supplementary checks may be needed where individuals have not lived in the UK for that period. This may mean your security clearance (and therefore your appointment) will take longer or, in some cases, not be possible.

In the Civil Service, we use Success Profiles to evaluate your skills and ability. This gives us the best possible chance of finding the right person for the job, increases performance and improves diversity and inclusivity. We'll be assessing your technical abilities, skills, experience and behaviours that are relevant to this role.

We'll also be assessing your experience and specialist technical skills against the following skills defined in the Government Digital and Data Capability Framework for the Technical Architecture role:

• Architect for the whole context.
• Community collaboration.
• Making architectural decisions.
• Strategy design.
• Technical design throughout the life cycle.

Recruitment Timeline

Sift completion: 27th November 2024.

Phone screens: From 4th December 2024.

Panel interviews: From 11th December 2024.

Candidates that do not pass the interview but have demonstrated an acceptable standard may be considered for similar roles at a lower grade.

A reserve list will be held for a period of 12 months, from which further appointments can be made.

Other information: Occasionally, business pressures, priorities or critical delivery may mean that we move you into a different team or work area within GDS. This will always be within the same grade and discipline within which you were hired, but does mean that your focus or objectives may shift in order to deliver GDS business.

Feedback will only be provided if you attend an interview or assessment.