Solutions Architect

Key areas of responsibility

• Provide architectural oversight and technical assurance, reviewing and challenging architectural deliverables including High-Level Designs (HLDs) and Low-Level Designs (LLDs).
• Hold the delivery partner to account for technical decisions, ensuring designs align with agreed architectural principles, integration constraints, and customer standards.
• Provide architectural guidance on hosting, access, and design documentation to support effective technical integration into the customer network and operational environment.
• Assure interoperability across systems and platforms, including the evaluation of architectural designs for deployment to alternative or evolving hosting environments.
• Support delivery by engaging with customer technical stakeholders, providing clear technical direction, and resolving architectural issues that may impact delivery or live service.
• Provide technical governance and assurance of the live service, ensuring architecture decisions remain valid, documented, and supportable through service operation.
• Evaluate emerging requirements, including new data types or evolving user needs, and assess the impact on existing architecture and delivery approaches.
• Recommend architectural patterns, options, and trade-offs to support informed decision-making by the customer.
• Support the establishment and ongoing operation of technical governance, standards, and assurance artefacts as the service and capability evolves.

Key skills, experience and behaviours

• Demonstrable experience operating as a Solutions Architect or equivalent role in complex, multi-stakeholder environments.
• Proven ability to review, assure, and challenge supplier architecture and technical deliverables.
• Strong understanding of system architecture, integration, hosting, and service considerations across the delivery lifecycle.
• Experience providing client-side technical governance and assurance rather than direct solution delivery.
• Ability to engage credibly with senior technical stakeholders, delivery teams, and suppliers.
• Comfortable operating at pace, managing ambiguity, and supporting evolving requirements.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, able to articulate architectural decisions, risks, and trade-offs clearly.

• Experience working in secure, regulated, or government environments.
• SFIA Level 5 capability in Architecture, Solution Design, or Technical Governance.
• Familiarity with service governance and live service assurance models.
• Experience working alongside data, security, or infrastructure architects.
• Knowledge of common architectural frameworks or patterns used in large-scale systems.
• Experience supporting delivery assurance on behalf of a customer organisation.

• You are comfortable taking ownership of technical quality and acting as a trusted advisor to your customer.
• You have the confidence to challenge supplier designs constructively and back that challenge with sound technical reasoning.
• You think in systems, considering how components interact, how services operate over time, and how design decisions affect users and operations.
• You are pragmatic and delivery-focused, recognising when to be precise and when to help teams move forward.
• You value clear governance, good documentation, and repeatable decision-making, and you enjoy helping to establish structure where it does not yet exist.

Working at Rowden