Technical Architect - Agile, API

Description

Main Duties and Responsibilities:

Provide thought leadership on emerging technologies, market trends, industry standards and best practices; Providing technical leadership to the wider architecture team; Responsible for architecture and design governance in line with Product and IT strategy, architectural roadmaps and Quality Policy with accountability for key design decisions; Provide hands-on technical leadership, in the development, operation and ongoing improvement of complex, transformational digital services serving millions of users; Work with product managers to understand user needs for new and existing services; Act as the technical authority in prospective, information gathering and scene setting meetings, evaluate technical proposals from external suppliers, and make implementation recommendations to senior stakeholders; Identify key API requirements for integration with internal and external systems; Lead development of user-driven prototypes to identify technical options and inform architectural approaches, working with colleagues and supplier team members to write tests, code and documentation for new and existing systems; Ensure system architectures are robust, scalable, open and secure, with appropriate overall system design and integration points/APIs, to deliver a high quality user experience.

Key tasks and deliverables:

* Provide hands-on technical leadership, in the development, operation and ongoing improvement of complex, digital services serving millions of users.

. Work with product managers to understand user needs for new and existing services.

. Act as the technical authority in prospective, information gathering and scene setting meetings across the Ministry of Justice and partner agencies, evaluate technical proposals from external suppliers, and make implementation recommendations to senior stakeholders.

. Work with delivery teams and partners to break technical requirements down into appropriate pieces, and to identify key API requirements for integration with internal and external systems.

. Lead the rapid development of user-driven prototypes to identify technical options and inform architectural approaches, working with colleagues and supplier team members to write tests, code and documentation for new and existing systems.

. Ensure that new and updated platforms, products and transactions are thoroughly tested for performance, are able to handle specified load, and can be maintained over the long-term.

. Work with external suppliers to ensure that their system architectures are robust, scalable, open and secure, with appropriate overall system design and integration points/APIs, to deliver a high quality user experience.

. Advise on, manage and implement agile delivery projects within government departments, providing guidance, mentoring and training in agile technical delivery and evolutionary software architecture across the Ministry of Justice and partner agencies.

. Provide mentorship and/or line management for software developers and junior software developers.

. Assist with building a culture of continuous delivery and improvement, ensuring that key systems are regularly analysed, maintained and improved.

. Embrace agile and lean approaches to architecture such as emergent architecture, micro-services, and service-oriented architecture.

Experience Required:

* Comprehensive and recent experience designing and implementing complex software systems, ie is an active software developer currently engaged in architecting and building high-volume digital services.

. Proven capability in managing technology implementation projects and in presenting to/working with stakeholders at every level of seniority.

. Focused on strategic alignment of technical design and architecture to meet business growth and direction.

. Knowledge of Agile product management, in particular determination of vision, objectives, goals and success criteria.

. Experience organising and performing prototyping and proof of concepts.

. Experience with Agile methodologies (TDD, SCRUM, Kanban, etc).

. Building and scaling high-traffic websites and/or high volume transaction processing and analysis platforms.

. Experience designing and implementing scalable and robust approaches to caching, security and databases (including relational, eg MySQL, PostgreSQL, and NoSQL , eg Cassandra, MongoDB).

. Experience with automated configuration management, deployment and testing solutions.

. Use and implementation of modern Front End web programming techniques, such as HTML5, CSS3, AJAX, REST, JSON.

. Experience with a web programming framework such as Django, Ruby on Rails, Scala/Play etc.

. Experience using and deploying on cloud based platforms.

. Experience sharing knowledge and working in a multi-disciplinary team.