Senior Solution Architect | Ref: PSR0039611

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is responsible for welfare, pensions, and child maintenance policy. As the UK's biggest public service department, it administers the State Pension and a range of working age, disability and ill health benefits to around 20 million claimants and customers. As such, we operate on a scale that is almost unmatched anywhere in Europe and most people in Britain come into contact with us at some point in their lives.
Working with DWP, you will be helping us to drive our priorities to:
+ Run an effective welfare system that enables people to achieve financial independence by providing assistance and guidance into employment.
+ Increase saving for, and security in later life.
+ Create a fair and affordable welfare system which improves the life chances of children.
+ Deliver outstanding services to our customers and claimants.
+ Deliver efficiently: transform the way we deliver our services to reduce costs and increase productivity.
As a Senior Solution Architect you will, working with engineering teams, be responsible for supporting the design, development, delivery and maintenance of IT products and services.
You will have deep knowledge in your field and help to grow the technical architecture community, helping to support the community and build high quality products and services.
You will share your knowledge and experience - blending technical knowledge, architecture and development skills. In addition, you will bring a breadth of understanding across a range of technical domains and depth of experience in at least one domain or specialism.
As a Senior Solution Architect your main responsibilities will be to:
+ Lead, deliver and support technical design of a product or part of a shared platform to meet user needs and business objectives.
+ Lead on ensuring high quality of technical design, and adherence to enterprise architecture principles and roadmaps.
+ Build relationships and work collaboratively with Digital professions in agile delivery teams to create VFM solution designs that meet user needs.
+ Support development of the DWP Architecture practice by sharing best practice and reference architectures to ensure consistency and coherence of DWP architecture design across DWP.
+ Engage with Enterprise Architects, Domain Architects, Lead Solution Architects and engineering teams to implement the solutions according to agreed and approved architecture designs.
+ Deliver product solutions and be accountable for product architecture in alignment with engineering.
+ Identify, capture, share and iterate architecture patterns to ensure consistent and coherent architecture design, contributing to the Enterprise Architecture.
+ Implement architecture patterns creating reference architectures as real-world working examples of successful architecture design.
+ Create solution options and recommendations during project discovery and inception phases to drive decision making on best solution design.
+ Make technology choices for products in conjunction with the enterprise architecture blueprint, contributing to the update of technology policies where appropriate.
+ Contribute to building an inclusive digital culture within the department.

+ Strong AWS knowledge and experience.
+ Experience of working with Microservices and API-led architecture.
+ Experience of working with Javascript and Node.js.
+ Ability to listen to the needs of the technical and business stakeholders and interpret between them.
+ Experience of designing systems characterised by medium levels of risk, impact and business or technical complexity.
+ Strong stakeholder management and communication skills and have the ability to work with and challenge senior stakeholders.
Desirable:
+ Network / Infrastructure experience.
+ Public Sector experience., Disability confident
As a member of the disability confident scheme, DWP guarantees to interview all candidates who have a disability and who meet all the essential criteria for the vacancy. In cases where we have a high volume of candidates who have a disability who meet all the essential criteria, we will interview the best candidates from within that group.