Lead Technical Architect - Recruitment Transformation

Job description
What you’ll work on:

You will join our cross-functional agile delivery team focusing on transforming Civil Service Jobs, and helping to redesign and deliver the future service.

Civil Service Jobs is used by over 3 million candidates per month to find and view vacancies across the Civil Service. Each year it handles over 2 million applications and advertises 140,000 posts. The live service is used by 211 organisations to advertise their vacancies and manage their recruitment processes. Currently, Civil Service Jobs is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) provision that has been configured and enhanced to meet Civil Service recruitment, digital and security standards.

Whilst maintaining the the live service, we are running a Recruitment Transformation programme, looking at what the future service should look like. We’ve completed our Discovery and Alpha phases, where we undertook extensive user research and prototyped designs, to understand our users’ needs and potential solutions for the biggest areas of improvement identified.

We’ve decided that our service needs to procure our future platform rather than building our own, so we’ve now moved into the Beta procurement phase, which will result in appointing a new technology platform in the summer of 2024, followed by a build and migration phase to be completed by end of 2025.

The Department:

The Government People Group exists to work with departments, professions, and functions to build a modern, effective Civil Service.

We support the government workforce with the right skills and capability. We are working with leaders to get the right people in the right jobs, with the right skills and continuous learning to excel in their roles.

We provide leadership, and in turn, create leaders with exceptional line management capability across departments, influencing partners in the wider public sector and beyond. This involves getting our retention and reward strategy right, to nurture specific skills, and create pride and resilience in our workforce.

Our role is also to provide system leadership across central government in pulling together back office services. Collectively, we help support the Cabinet Office’s priority to drive efficiencies, and reforms that will make government work better, to ultimately provide a better service to the public.

Person specification
We follow the DDaT job description model for Technical Architect. We'd expect the role to have a good understanding of the Government Digital Service Manual, the GDS Design System, and our Technology Code of Practice.

We’re looking for people who are passionate about designing and delivering brilliant services which are simple and effective for everyone to use.

As the Technical Architect you will be embedded into the service’s digital delivery team as its “tech lead”, working alongside product managers, business analysts, user researchers, designers, and third party Supplier Delivery teams. You will ensure that technology decisions are informed, feasible and aligned with standards and strategy..

You’ll ensure the project’s overall technical design and architecture meets user needs and acceptance criteria, whilst conforming to time and budget constraints. You’ll thrive using agile and waterfall methods and enjoy working collaboratively with our users and multidisciplinary teams. Above all, you’ll want to make Government better, which may sometimes involve challenging the status quo.

As a Lead Technical Architect you will:

Develop a deep technical understanding of the Government’s recruitment operating platforms, sufficient to provide technical leadership on the evolution of cloud solutions and how the service can integrate with Shared Service ERP Clusters and other backing services.
Design technical services or plan system integration, selecting necessary platforms and technologies to meet project requirements and user needs
Produce clear and concise materials, backed by strong reasoning and robust methodologies to explain and recommend further evolution and development of shared service infrastructure
Provide technical leadership and consultancy to delivery teams, ensuring infrastructure is fit for purpose, whilst meeting time and budget restraints
Get involved in the assessment and procurement of prospective recruitment technology, leading on the technical requirements definition, e.g. on API definition or integration projects
Consult on the digital delivery of the recruitment transformation programme, alongside the Service Owner, Product Manager and Delivery Manager, leading on the technical part e.g. integration, testing, security assurance, communicating with supplier technical teams
Build and maintain technical roadmaps, looking ahead for future opportunities, technologies to consider, and ensuring decisions by the Recruitment Service 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
Enable a positive technical culture, applying agile methods to development and completing quality assurance practices
Advise product managers on the estimated effort and technical implications of current user stories, as well as those in the backlog
Help enable the reuse of patterns, tools, and components across the whole government service landscape