SC Eligible highly desired
Contract: 6 month initial period with option to extend
Rate: £725 inside IR35
Location: 1/2 days a month on site, some weekend work may be required for migration cutovers.
Your Role
As Lead Solution Architect, you will lead the team of Solution Architects working across a squad. You will provide architectural oversight from service discovery through migration planning, testing, cutover and early-life support, ensuring that technical decisions align to the agreed programme approach and that dependencies are managed across service boundaries.
You will lead the architecture function day to day, coaching and guiding Solution Architects, reviewing migration approaches and escalating or resolving complex technical issues that span multiple services. You will remain close enough to the technical details to challenge assumptions, support difficult decisions and intervene where architecture, integration, infrastructure, security or operational readiness creates delivery risk.
You will work closely with programme leadership, discovery teams, Delivery Managers, Migration Engineers, Infrastructure Engineers, AWS specialists, managed hosting specialists, UK Government network and security teams, service owners and technical SMEs. You will act as the senior architecture point of coordination across these groups and provide clear technical direction to the wider architecture team.
Key Responsibilities
Lead, coordinate and provide technical direction to the team of Solution Architects working across a squad.
Own architectural coherence across the migration programme, ensuring service-level migration approaches align to established AWS patterns, hosting principles and programme controls.
Review and assure Solution Architect outputs, including migration approaches, dependencies, connectivity requirements, technical risks, cutover readiness and rollback considerations.
Provide senior technical governance for complex or high-risk services and resolve architectural issues that span multiple PODs, Wave Squads or technology domains.
Maintain a programme-level view of upstream and downstream dependencies, integration points, shared infrastructure, network routes and sequencing constraints.
Ensure the architecture team translates discovery outputs into clear, executable technical plans for Migration Engineers, Infrastructure Engineers and supporting technical teams.
Chair or lead architecture reviews where required, driving timely decisions and clear ownership of technical actions, risks, assumptions and exceptions.
Coach and support Solution Architects, raising consistency and quality across technical analysis, documentation, stakeholder engagement and migration readiness.
Work with AWS, managed hosting, application, platform, database, network, security and legacy technology specialists to resolve cross-cutting technical constraints.Essential skills
Proven experience as a Lead Solution Architect, Principal Architect, Lead Technical Architect or equivalent on large-scale hosting transition, application migration or cloud migration programmes.
Direct experience leading architects and technical teams responsible for moving live services, rather than solely designing target-state or greenfield cloud solutions.
Strong technical understanding across applications, infrastructure, databases, middleware, networks and service integration.
Experience interpreting service discovery information and converting it into practical migration plans using defined patterns or repeatable migration approaches.
Experience managing complex upstream and downstream dependencies and re-establishing connectivity across firewalls, networks and hosting boundaries.
Experience providing technical leadership to Solution Architects and engineering teams through migration planning, execution, testing, cutover and rollback.
Ability to work in technical detail, investigate difficult service-specific problems and make pragmatic decisions under delivery constraints.
Broad exposure to legacy enterprise estates. Candidates are not expected to be deep specialists in every technology, but should be comfortable working across mixed stacks and coordinating relevant SMEs.
Strong understanding of operational readiness, security, access, resilience, monitoring, testing and service continuity requirements.
Experience operating within architectural governance, technical controls and multi-supplier delivery environments.
Strong leadership and communication skills, with confidence challenging and guiding architects, engineers, service owners, technical SMEs and senior programme stakeholders.Desirable skills
Experience of UK public-sector, regulated or business-critical service environments.
Experience migrating services into AWS and managed hosting environments such as managed hosting, including virtual-machine-led rehosting or relocation approaches.
Experience with one or more legacy technology groups such as Java, .NET, Oracle, WebLogic, IIS, Windows/Linux, AIX, Solaris, COBOL, GEN or mainframe.
Experience leading architecture across high-volume wave-based migration programmes involving multiple PODs, Wave Squads, services and parallel technical teams.
Experience supporting production cutovers where downtime, rollback and continuity risks require careful control.
Current or transferable security clearance, or eligibility to obtain the required clearance
Salary description
£0.00 - £725.00 per day