About the job

Job summary

We are building a family at Scottish Government, not just jobs. Your role as part of our architect family, will be essential to our success.

The Scottish Government’s digital strategy “A changing nation: how Scotland will thrive in a Digital world” sets out specific actions for Transforming Government aligned to the National Performance Framework. Of most relevance to this role: build a suite of common platforms to be adopted across the public sector. This role sits within the Cloud and Digital Services Division, part of Scottish Government’s Digital Directorate. This division brings together three programmes that are focused on achieving this strategic outcome: ScotAccount, ScotPayments and SG Cloud Platform. All three are aligned to the commitment in the 2021 Digital Strategy on developing common platforms and component technologies, to assist increased efficiency in the delivery of public services across public sector in Scotland.

As a divisional role for Cloud and Digital Services, this post will initially sit as part of a multi-disciplinary Payments team working on transforming the way the Scottish Government facilitates payments across government and the wider public sector, with a long-term vision to design, build and manage a common, consistent and reliable payments service built on a single payments platform.

The Payments service (ScotPayments) is core to the wider common platforms aim in the Digital Strategy of the Scottish Government helping valuable public services to be delivered securely, efficiently in an accessible way.

In addition to developing the Payments platform, you will play a key role in assisting the wider division and its programmes of common platforms and support their adoption across the Scottish Public Sector. Working at scale and with a wide variety of public service users our work is technically complex, rich in variety and provides a real sense of pride - knowing we help make a positive, tangible difference on people’s lives.

Job description

A lead security architect undertakes complex work of a high-risk level, often working on several projects.

At this role level, you will:

• interact with senior stakeholders across departments.
• reach and influence a wide range of people across larger teams and communities.
• research and apply innovative security architecture solutions to new or existing problems and be able to justify and communicate design decisions.
• develop vision, principles, and strategy for security architects for multiple projects or technologies.
• work out subtle security needs.
• understand the impact of decisions, balancing requirements and deciding between approaches.
• produce particular patterns and support quality assurance.
• be the point of escalation for architects in lower grade roles.
• lead the security design of systems and services.

Person specification

No formal qualifications are required for this role. We would love you to apply if you meet the following essential criteria. If you would like to chat first, please get in touch

1. Understand security implications of digital transformation; challenge and lead changes to policy and processes to support business outcomes, business architecture, and legal and political implications with associated experience in designing secure solutions using industry standard tools and techniques.
2. Demonstrate a deep understanding of security concepts, standards and frameworks and can apply them to a technical level and effectively translate and accurately communicate security and risk implications to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
3. Experience of both assuring 3rd party architecture designs ensuring adherence to agreed policies, standards, and design patterns and also assuring project outputs against agreed architectural design.
4. Experience of designing standards based technical security controls and standards in a variety of modern cloud applications using autonomic infrastructure including Amazon Web Services and/or Azure environments. Standards should ideally include ISO 27001, NCSC CAF, OWASP ASVS and CIS Benchmark.

Benefits

Alongside your salary of £72,310, Scottish Government contributes £19,523 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides.

Things you need to know

Selection process details

Sift and Interview dates TBC

Feedback will only be provided if you attend an interview or assessment.

Security

People working with government assets must complete baseline personnel security standard (opens in new window) checks.

Nationality requirements

This job is broadly open to the following groups:

• UK nationals
• nationals of the Republic of Ireland
• nationals of Commonwealth countries who have the right to work in the UK
• nationals of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein and family members of those nationalities with settled or pre-settled status under the European Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS) (opens in a new window)
• nationals of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein and family members of those nationalities who have made a valid application for settled or pre-settled status under the European Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS)
• individuals with limited leave to remain or indefinite leave to remain who were eligible to apply for EUSS on or before 31 December 2020
• Turkish nationals, and certain family members of Turkish nationals, who have accrued the right to work in the Civil Service

Further information on nationality requirements (opens in a new window)

Working for the Civil Service

The Civil Service Code (opens in a new window) sets out the standards of behaviour expected of civil servants.

We recruit by merit on the basis of fair and open competition, as outlined in the Civil Service Commission's recruitment principles (opens in a new window). The Civil Service embraces diversity and promotes equal opportunities. As such, we run a Disability Confident Scheme (DCS) for candidates with disabilities who meet the minimum selection criteria.