D365 Solution Architect

This contract with our government client is for a D365 Solution Architect for 7 months. The role is primarily remote with office visits up to 2 days/fortnight (Usually London, but Birmingham a possibility).  

This is a critical role for an experienced Architect, who can work with delivery and operational teams, to support the design, development and sustainability of the client's products and services, and their strategic roadmap.  

In this role you will provide support to teams by delivering architecture design, clarifying technical complexity and you will communicate with senior stakeholders, both technical and non-technical, across the organisation.  

As well as Product teams, you will work with Development, and Platforms & Infrastructure teams to implement technical solutions. Additionally, you will have good knowledge of DevOps principles and be familiar with agile approaches to architecture and development.  

This role encompasses all aspects of service design, conceptual, logical and physical. You will be expected to maintain consistency between services, fit with other technology solutions, and ensure that architecture standards are adhered to.  

You will also develop solution design documentation to recognised architecture standards, with alignment to the architecture strategy, roadmaps and reference architectures as well as helping to govern against these directions.  

Key accountabilities and responsibilities:  

1. Understand an organisation’s ecosystem and its inter-dependencies, ensuring quality and integrity of new solutions in their ecosystem.  

2. Design technical solutions to meet user and business needs and align with the client's technical strategy and standards.  

3. Guide projects in making the correct technology decisions, promoting reuse, sustainability and scalability to achieve value for money.  

4. Translate technical concepts between systems engineering, delivery management and service management, as well as developing and documenting the proposed technical design for the integration and implementation of any solution.  

5. Provide a consistent set of solution views, that communicate and describe the construction of the solution to all stakeholders, making the complex simple to understand.  

6. Work with internal stakeholders to support discovery and design work, blending technical and communication skills.  

7. Provide assurance to the Technical Design Authority that technical solutions comply with the client's and Government Digital Services Technology Code of Practice design principles and standards.  

8. Working with the Chief Architect, establish and maintain architectural principles, standards, blueprints, roadmaps and transitions states that underpin all technical design and delivery.  

9. Ensure technical quality and adherence of solution designs to the architectural principles, standards and enterprise architecture, whilst ensuring coherence with the wider government approach to technology.  

10. Lead the work within projects to embed the architectural design gates within the overall governance process ensuring reference information is published, maintained and readily available.

Key skills and knowledge:  

1. A sound knowledge of architecture methodologies and frameworks and experience of their application.  

2. Experience of modern IT paradigms including event-based architecture design, containerisation, microservices and loose coupling.  

3. A good understanding of a broad range of technologies including development and specification languages (such as HTML/CSS, C# .Net and .NET Core, Java), transactional databases and DWHs, as well as some experience of NoSQL (such as CosmosDB and MongoDB) and CI/CD tools (such as Terraform and Jenkins).  

4. Experience of an API-first and services-led design approach, with the ability to use business requirements, user stories, data standards, and integration patterns to help to define services and APIs.  

5. A sound knowledge of cloud technologies, cloud hosting, container, serverless, and networking design patterns, tools and best practice (e.g. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform).  

Key competencies:  

1. A broad and up-to-date knowledge of current state and emerging developments across technology areas including infrastructure, networks, applications and data; bringing this knowledge and expertise to bear in the design of systems.  

2. An ability to translate your understanding and communicate across technical and non-technical stakeholders, advocating for a dynamic, design-led and architected approach, as well as facilitating discussions within a multidisciplinary team.  

3. Working with the Chief Architect, establish and maintain architectural principles, standards, blueprints, roadmaps and transitions states that underpin all technical design and delivery.  

Key performance measures:  

1. Supporting the development of the Architecture Practice within the organisation and across wider government.  

2. That all solutions support the architectural principles, standards, blueprints, roadmaps and transitions states.  

Values and key behaviours:  

1. Collaborative - together we achieve more.  

2. Creative - using knowledge to support the design of new and innovative services.  

3. Commercial - ensuring that the designs provide great value for money.