Solution Architect
| Job Type | Contract |
| Location | East Kilbride |
| Area | Scotland, UK |
| Sector | Central Government |
| Salary | £1,200 Per Day |
| Start Date | September 22nd, 2025 |
| Advertiser | Priyanka Dubey |
| Job Ref | 7146 - PSR1JP00094743 |
| IR35 | Inside |
| Security Clearance | SC |
- Description
- The Client:
A government department client is looking for a Solution Architect to join them on a 6 month contract. This position will be in East Kilbride.
Job Summary:
The Solution Architect plays a strategic leadership role in shaping and assuring the technical architecture across large programmes and critical business areas. This role is pivotal in ensuring architectural coherence, governance, and alignment with organisational objectives, while enabling delivery teams to build secure, scalable, and sustainable solutions.
Architectural Oversight & Leadership
- Provide architectural leadership across multiple programmes and complex domains.
- Oversee the technical delivery of solutions, ensuring alignment with enterprise architecture principles and strategic goals.
- Lead and mentor solution architects, fostering a culture of architectural excellence and continuous improvement.
- Act as the final escalation point for architectural decisions, balancing risk, impact, and complexity.
High-Level Design Creation & Review:
- Define and assure high-level solution designs that meet business and technical requirements.
- Review and approve architecture artefacts, ensuring they are fit for purpose and adhere to standards.
- Guide teams in applying architectural patterns, principles, and best practices throughout the solution lifecycle.
- Ensure traceability between business requirements and technical designs.
Business-as-Usual Architecture Activities:
- Lead the development and maintenance of architecture governance frameworks, including decision-making processes and assurance models.
- Create and maintain reusable architecture templates, standards, and reference models.
- Collaborate with stakeholders to ensure architectural compliance with internal policies, external regulations, and strategic objectives.
- Contribute to the evolution of enterprise architecture through feedback, lessons learned, and emerging trends.
Essential:
- Stakeholder Management: You will have proven ability to lead and influence stakeholders across multiple disciplines, crafting and advocating for long-term technical vision aligned with business strategy. This will include experience of interacting with, and influencing, senior stakeholders and a wide range of people across large teams, departments, suppliers, and customers.
- Communicating & Influencing: You will have exceptional communication skills, adept at translating complex technical concepts for both technical and non-technical audiences. Proven ability to collaborate effectively with cross-functional teams and build strong relationships with vendors.
- Delivery: You will have practical hands-on experience in technical and solution architecture and design including within programmes, projects, or a product-centric organisation, across agile and waterfall methodologies.
- Making Effective Decisions: You will have strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with a demonstrated ability to identify and address technical challenges. You will be passionate about exploring and implementing innovative solutions to meet evolving government needs.
- Technology Expertise: You will have a good understanding of a broad range of industry-standard technologies, both proprietary and open source, across a diverse range of Microsoft and Linux-based deployments, across physical, virtual, and containerised compute.
- Software & Infrastructure Expertise: You will have a good understanding of both software and infrastructure design considerations and be comfortable working with engineers to understand and guide the datacentre environment that applications are deployed into.
- Architecture Leadership: You will have deep experience in working in an architecture function and leading the development of the vision, principles, and strategy for architects for a set of products, projects, and technologies. You will be practised in creating technical standards, blueprints, reference architectures, roadmaps, transition states and target solutions across multiple services.
- Cloud Expertise: Experience designing and implementing cloud solutions across major providers (e.g. Azure, AWS, GCP, Oracle) Expertise in navigating platform-specific features and optimising and automating (IaC) deployments for maximum security, performance, and cost-effectiveness. Strong understanding of cloud governance models and compliance frameworks relevant to government environments.
Desirable:
- On-Premise Classified Environments: Extensive experience architecting and securing solutions within highly sensitive and classified environments, including familiarity with relevant security policies, regulations, and best practices.
- Zero Trust: Deep understanding of zero trust principles and their application in designing secure architectures, including experience with identity-based access control, micro-segmentation, and data encryption.
- Secure by Design: Proven track record of incorporating security considerations into all phases of the solution design lifecycle, ensuring compliance with relevant security standards and regulations.
- Identity & Access Management: In-depth experience with identity and access management solutions, including privileged access management, and ability to architect secure authentication and authorisation mechanisms.
- Software Defined Data Centres: Experience with software-defined networking, storage, and compute solutions, including virtualization technologies and their implementation in government data centres.
An active SC clearance is required for this role. At a minimum, candidates must be eligible and willing to undergo security clearance. Due to the short-term nature of the contract and the urgency of the requirement, the client may prioritise applicants who already hold active SC clearance and meet all essential criteria.
Our Company:
Malikshaw Interim & Executive is a specialist provider of talent management solutions helping our clients transform the delivery of our public services. As an Equal Opportunities Employer, we combine providing the best talent with delivering diverse, inclusive workforces and particularly encourage applications from candidates who are likely to be underrepresented. These include people from Black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds, disabled people, LGBTQI+ people, and women.
How to Apply:
Please apply through the link provided to send your application directly to the Recruiter managing this assignment.
If you qualify for any of the above, please notify us on your covering letter and your recruiter will confirm if the client is a member. We will then be in touch to discuss your suitability and arrange your Guaranteed Interview.
Should you require reasonable adjustments at any point during the recruitment process or if there is a more accessible way for us to communicate, please do let me know.
- Provide architectural leadership across multiple programmes and complex domains.
