We’re recruiting for Lead Technical Architects here at Justice Digital, to be part of our warm and collaborative teams within our Strategic Hosting Platforms and 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.  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 Technical 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. 

A Lead Technical Architect can see the big picture, understanding our complex technology landscape, and can clearly and effectively communicate that big picture by building trust, developing great relationships, and empathising with others.  They provide mentoring and support to other architects and engineering leadership in their service area, and they have a good understanding of a broad range of technologies, with experience in both software engineering and commercial enterprise, as well as providing effective governance, both within our organisation, and across our suppliers.

We are a flexible organisation and we understand that people can't always work 5 days a week or might have responsibilities that sometimes clash with standard office hours. We work as flexibly as we can, including offering part time hours, so if in doubt please do get in touch. If you're the right candidate we will do our best to work around you.

To help picture your life at MoJ Justice Digital please take a look at our blog and our Digital and Technology strategy 2025

Key Responsibilities

• Collaborate with the Principal Technical Architect to create a technical vision for Legal Aid or our Strategic Hosting, develop our strategy, and be accountable for our technology estate as a whole.

• Communicate about our technology across teams and professions, both within our Digital unit and across all parts of the Ministry of Justice; seeing the big picture, and bringing it to all stakeholders.

• Advocate for a diverse, inclusive culture across the engineering community, growing awareness, inclusivity, and balance, including being a champion for increasing women and minorities in our workforce.

• Collaborate and find agreement with senior stakeholders, providing both technical and non-technical direction and challenge, as well as pragmatic compromise to deliver value.

• Mentor, coach, line-manage, and recruit more great technical architects and engineering leadership, helping build a sustainable work force plan to deliver our strategy.

• Create structured analysis of technical concepts, providing insight for multi-disciplinary decision-making, whilst seeking opportunities to collaborate and reuse common components.

• 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.

Our Tech Stack

This is our tech, both strategic and legacy.  You don’t need to have experience with all of these, but we hope you see some familiar things.

• Modern strategic software built in Ruby, Java, and Python 

• Public GitHub repositories for our work

• Resilient infrastructure in the cloud (primarily AWS), using infrastructure as code (IaC) and platforms as a service (PaaS) 

• Progressive software development practices such as Domain-Driven Design (DDD), test-driven development (TDD), continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD)

• Enterprise Oracle software, including Enterprise Resource Planning (E-Business Suite), Identity Access Management (IDAM), Oracle Intelligent Advisor (OIA), Oracle Forms, and multiple PL/SQL-based bespoke services.

• Mac laptops for delivering our work

If this feels like an exciting challenge, something you are enthusiastic about, and want to join our team please read on and apply!

Person specification

Please refer to the attached Description