About the job

Job summary

Ofgem works on behalf of energy consumers to ensure that every household and business in the UK can rely on a safe and sustainable energy supply.  
  
What we do matters: making a difference to people’s lives now, and for generations to come. We offer a diverse range of flexible working career opportunities: roles that are stimulating and rewarding, and it’s important to us that we recruit from a wide range of professional and personal backgrounds – bringing different perspectives and experiences to our work. Within this role you will be part of our DDaT profession in which you will be supported throughout your career in professional and personal development with our People’s Programme, fantastic L&D opportunities and the opportunity to work flexibly across teams.  
  
We now have an opportunity for a Senior Solutions Architect who can bring a well-rounded and experienced perspective to leading design work on projects, resulting in high quality end-to-end solution design. You’ll work in collaboration with an agile project team to pursue outcomes that meet business requirements; move enterprise architecture forward; and can be supported and maintained without increasing costs or complexity. You’ll lead, mentor and collaborate within the Ofgem architecture community and promote best engineering practice.   
  
We expect that you will offer experience in more than one of the following disciplines: architecture; development; application management; or testing. You should be accustomed to adopting a collaborative approach to complex, cross functional projects and be able to quickly get to grips with business needs and identify appropriate digital solutions. It’s important that your technical skills are supported by the communication skills that are key to conveying complex subject matter to technical and non-technical audiences.  
  
Ofgem is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We embrace diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. All employment is decided on the basis of open and fair competition, merit and business need.

Job description

Purpose 

As a Senior Software Application Architect, you’ll share the responsibility for the digital transformation of government and be the design authority on a project team, designing solutions in line with Ofgem’s Reference Architecture.   

Coming from a software development background, you will have experience in writing .NET applications as well as architecting the bigger picture solution.   

You’ll have a vision for government services and GDS assessments and are able to communicate this to developers and non-developers alike.  

You’ll ensure a project’s overall technical design meets user needs and acceptance criteria, whilst conforming to time and budget constraints.  

You’ll thrive using agile methods and enjoy working collaboratively with departments and multidisciplinary teams.  

Above all, you’ll want to make government better, which may sometimes involve challenging the status quo. 

Person specification

Key Responsibilities 

• Design technical services or plan system integration, selecting necessary platforms and technologies to meet project requirements and user needs. 
• Design solutions, including data storage and security, in line with the Ofgem’s reference architecture. 
• Collaborate and network with infrastructure, security, data and operations colleagues. 
• Implement a Microservice Shared Service Architecture. 
• Create and maintain clear and concise architecture documentation and designs. 
• Provide Solution Architecture solutions to the Technical Leads and Developers to enable them to design the Technical Architecture and implement the solution. 
• Build and maintain technical roadmaps, looking ahead for future opportunities or blockers and ensuring decisions by development teams align with the strategy. 
• Encourage communication across multiple development teams to identify strategic requirements and dependencies. 
• Contribute to the Technical Design Authority. 
• 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. 

Key Deliverables 

• Supporting the team in delivering the most innovative and effective digital solutions. 
• Representing the Architecture team, ensuring the clear definition of programmes of work can be planned from the architecture. 
• Overseeing and governing key Architectural deliverables throughout all project phases (requirements, analysis, design, construction and testing). 
• Supporting the IT and Business strategy through short-, medium- and long-term architecture programmes. 
• Driving efficiency improvements throughout the project lifecycles and making the best use of technology. 
• Providing technical architecture expertise. 

Essential Criteria

• Proven levels of technical knowledge for designing, implementing and supporting technology architecture across a broad range of Microsoft technologies. (Lead criteria) 
• Strong experience of the full software development lifecycle (SDLC), including the management of architecture and development phases. (Lead criteria) 
• Recent experience with cloud technology architectures (predominately Azure). 
• Good working knowledge of software development methodologies including Agile or SCRUM. 

Desirable Criteria

• Strong previous experience of applying IT security to technology architecture and software lifecycles. 
• Experience working with CRM/XRM Software experience such as Salesforce. 

Benefits

Alongside your salary of £45,614, OFGEM contributes £12,315 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

This vacancy is using Success Profiles (opens in a new window), and will assess your Behaviours and Technical skills.

When you press the ‘Apply now’ button, you will be asked to complete personal details (not seen by the sift panel), and upload a copy of your CV anonymising all details where necessary.  

You will then be asked to answer 3 Technical Questions evidencing how you meet the essential and desirable skills and capabilities listed in the role profile. Please ensure you demonstrate clearly, within these answers how you meet each of the essential and desirable skills and capabilities. 

The Civil Service values honesty and integrity and expect all candidates to abide by these principles. Ofgem take any incidences of cheating very seriously. Please ensure all examples provided are of your own experience. Any instances of plagiarism or other forms of cheating will be investigated and, if proven, the relevant applications will be withdrawn from the process. 

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

Security

Successful candidates must undergo a criminal record check. 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. The Civil Service also offers a Redeployment Interview Scheme to civil servants who are at risk of redundancy, and who meet the minimum requirements for the advertised vacancy.