Security Architect

As a member of the Central Government architecture capability, you design and deliver best-in-class solutions that meet the business and technical needs of our clients, ensuring technical and architectural integrity, and delivering to time, cost and quality criteria. The role of the Security Architect is to ensure that the critical services delivered to our clients are securely designed and delivered to the highest quality standards. You will leverage expertise, experience and best-practices in secure design and development to minimise security risk., * Collaborate with colleagues across other disciplines to ensure consideration of architecture at all stages of the delivery lifecycle and to ensure input into architecture processes.

• Collaborates with other specialists to ensure advice given is appropriate to the organisation's needs
• Understand client's ecosystem and interdependencies, including reference architectures
• Lead the security architectures for moderately complex projects and programmes of work across the Central Government division.
• Support scoping and remediation for IT Health Check (ITHC) and 3rd-party penetration testing exercises.
• Work with customers and accreditors to identify security risk & requirements, advise on impact and to effectively assure resulting solution design and build.
• Collaborate with colleagues across other disciplines to ensure consideration of security at all stages of the lifecycle.
• Work independently or as part of a team to translate business needs into the design of security solution architectures for external clients, and internal delivery teams.
• Understand and articulate approaches to Security Architecture at the Enterprise level.
• Influence Enterprise Security strategy for customer programmes of work.
• Develop and articulate security reference architectures for customer programmes of work.
• Contributes to the development of organisational strategies that address information control requirements.
• Contribute to defining best practices and promote secure-by-design principles across Central Government division.
• Ensure architectural principles are applied during design to reduce risk.
• Use best-practice methods for identification and mitigation of security threats.
• Contribute to architectural principles, policies and standards.
• Ensures adherence to applicable standards (corporate, industry, national and international).
• Provide advice, leadership and mentoring for teams, defining standards and best practices.
• Engage directly with clients on a consultative/pre-sales basis to develop pipeline of work.
• Work as part of a team to design and support development of proof of concepts and deliver client demonstrations.
• Act as pre-sales architect for bids and proposals, assisting with estimation and planning.
• Participate in business development providing architectural input and meeting with clients to secure new business.
• Work as part of a team to develop architectures for industry focused sales propositions.
• Identification of new and emerging industry trends, software, technologies, products, services, methods and techniques and the assessment of their relevance and potential value for solutions, improvements in cost/performance or sustainability.
• Mentor junior team members, providing feedback and support to career development.
• Participate in development of internal architecture capability, including contributing to identification and definition of best practices, standards and ways of working.
• Promotion of emerging technology awareness among staff and business management.
• Support identification of training needs across internal delivery teams.
• Identify and monitor environmental and market trends and proactively assesses impact on business strategies, benefits and risks.
• Maintain visibility of the current security landscape, including awareness of latest vulnerabilities. Understand and articulate the impact of vulnerabilities on solutions.
• Actively maintains knowledge in one or more identifiable specialisms.
• Consult and support collaboration across client business
• Participates in and can lead meetings with stakeholders.

• Degree level education, or equivalent.
• Able to work independently or as part of a multi-disciplinary team
• Ability to articulate and present different points-of-views on various technologies and architecture patterns.
• Ability to articulate and present different points-of-views on various technologies and architecture patterns from a software and solution security perspective.
• Understands and communicates industry developments, and the role and impact of technology
• Consultancy skills, including the ability to communicate effectively with diverse stakeholders at senior levels.
• Good interpersonal skills with the ability to guide, direct, motivate and support staff either directly or indirectly.
• Highly customer focused, able to quickly build trust and develop customer intimacy
• Promotes a learning and growth culture in their area of accountability.
• Actively support and promotes the development and sharing of specialist knowledge within the organisation.
• Solution-oriented with the imagination to identify innovative approaches to critical problems.
• Effective time management and an ability to recognise and respond to changing priorities and requirements.
• Good organisation skills.
• Self-starting and self-motivated with a positive, can-do attitude.
• Strong team-player, able to work well with others.

Technologies, Methodologies and Frameworks:

• Relevant industry recognised Technical Qualifications. E.g. CISSP, SABSA, CISM, Certified Ethical Hacker, Microsoft Cybersecurity Architect Expert, AWS Certified Security - Specialty
• Strong understanding and practical experience of performing security threat modelling and articulating risk profiles to teams and customers.
• Deep understanding of security concepts and demonstrated application to technical solutions.
• Knowledge and experience of secure architecture patterns and associated standards and technologies
• Knowledge and experience of design and configuration of security tool chains as part of a DevSecOps approach.
• Experience of Secure Software Development Lifecycle processes and methodologies.
• Experience working with multi-disciplinary teams.
• Knowledge and experience of applying best practice for handling personal data. E.g., GDPR.
• Knowledge and experience of applying best practice for solution security. E.g., OWASP, NCSC cloud security principles
• Knowledge and experience of applying best practice within one or more specialist architecture domains.
• Strong understanding and practical experience of working with multi-discipline teams to deliver complex technology services.
• Understands and communicates industry developments, and the role and impact of technology

Desirable skills

• Experience of working in secure customer environments
• Active SC clearance, or ability to successfully undertake clearance
• Experience of common Enterprise Architecture frameworks such as TOGAF, Zachman etc…
• Knowledge and experience of using Architecture modelling tools such as Sparx Enterprise Architect
• Experience working in the UK Central Government or Defence sectors.
• Industry recognised Technical Qualifications* Knowledge and experience of designing and delivering solutions based on the capabilities of public cloud providers such as Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services.
• Knowledge and experience of DevOps and Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment tools and practices.
• Knowledge and experience of Single Sign on and Authentication/Authorisation technologies such as SAML, OAuth, OpenID Connect, Active Directory, ADFS and LDAP
• TOGAF certified with experience of applying the framework in a client environment
• Experience of secure development using either Java or .NET and associated tools and frameworks.
• Experience of design of secure solutions based on on-premises and/or hybrid hosting architectures
• Knowledge and experience of secure web application development* Knowledge and experience of secure data architectures and associated patterns and technologies