Technical Architect - Shared Platforms & Enterprise Services

Shivom Consultancy is looking for an experienced Senior Technical Architect to join our growing architecture practice and help shape complex shared platforms and enterprise services for major UK public sector organisations.

You will work across multiple products, platforms and delivery teams, providing architecture leadership for services that are consumed across an organisation rather than owned by a single product team. The role requires someone who can combine strong technical architecture skills with practical delivery experience. You will work closely with enterprise architects, product teams, engineers, cyber security specialists, data teams, platform teams and third party suppliers to create secure, resilient and reusable solutions. This role is intended to support a significant UK public sector architecture engagement, as well as other enterprise transformation programmes within Shivom. What you will be doing You will:

• Lead solution architecture for shared platforms and enterprise services supporting multiple products and business areas.
• Develop solution visions, high level solution approaches and high level designs covering application, cloud, integration, data, security and infrastructure considerations.
• Translate business and service requirements into scalable, secure and maintainable technical solutions.
• Assess architecture options and trade offs, providing clear recommendations supported by technical, commercial and operational considerations.
• Define functional and non functional requirements including resilience, availability, performance, security, scalability, maintainability and supportability.
• Develop current, target and transition architectures for long lived platforms and services.
• Contribute to three to five year technology and service roadmaps, including dependencies, transition states, lifecycle considerations and technical debt.
• Work with product and engineering teams throughout the delivery lifecycle, from early shaping and discovery through implementation and live service.
• Provide architectural guidance to technical leads and engineers and review implementation against agreed architecture.
• Identify architectural risks, dependencies and technical debt and recommend proportionate remediation approaches.
• Prepare architecture decisions and designs for technical governance and design authority forums.
• Promote the use of shared capabilities, reusable patterns and common services rather than duplicated or product specific solutions.
• Identify opportunities to simplify and rationalise existing services where overlapping capabilities exist.
• Maintain architecture documentation and decisions using appropriate architecture and knowledge management tooling.
• Support proofs of concept, technical feasibility exercises and option evaluations where required.
• Architect shared communication, audio, video and recording capabilities and their integration with wider enterprise services where required., * Understand a complex problem quickly and establish a clear architecture direction.
• Develop pragmatic target architectures without losing sight of immediate delivery constraints.
• Influence multiple teams without becoming a bottleneck.
• Create architecture that engineers can actually implement.
• Make clear decisions when there are competing technical, operational and commercial considerations.
• Identify opportunities to reuse existing capabilities before introducing new technology.
• Maintain architectural coherence across services owned and delivered by different teams.
• Improve resilience, security, operability and maintainability as part of the architecture rather than treating them as afterthoughts.
• Communicate confidently with senior stakeholders while retaining sufficient technical depth to work directly with engineers.

Security requirements Security Clearance: Applicants must either hold current SC clearance or be eligible to obtain SC clearance. Candidates without existing clearance must be willing to complete the required vetting process as a condition of appointment. Benefits At Shivom, we want our people to build long term careers while working on meaningful and technically challenging programmes.

Our benefits package includes:

• Competitive base salary
• Employer pension contribution
• Generous annual leave entitlement plus UK bank holidays
• Hybrid and flexible working arrangements, subject to client and security requirements
• Support for professional certifications, technical training and continuous professional development
• Access to architecture, cloud, security, data and engineering learning opportunities
• Opportunities to work on major UK public sector digital transformation programmes
• Career progression within Shivom’s architecture and technology leadership community
• Regular knowledge sharing, technical forums and architecture communities of practice
• Support for maintaining and progressing professional and security clearances where required
• Employee wellbeing support
• Company sponsored social and team events
• Employee referral opportunities
• Private medical insurance
• Critical illness cover
• Recognition and performance related reward opportunities

About Shivom Consultancy At Shivom, our architects work on complex digital transformation programmes where architecture has a direct impact on service delivery. We focus on practical architecture that connects strategy with engineering and enables teams to deliver secure, resilient and sustainable technology. You will join an architecture community with the opportunity to work across cloud, data, integration, security, platforms and digital services while helping shape architecture practices and reusable capability across our client portfolio.

Why join Shivom?

You will have the opportunity to work on complex, nationally significant digital services while developing your career within a growing architecture practice. We combine the variety and technical challenge of consulting with the opportunity to build longer term relationships with clients and delivery teams.

• Significant experience working as a Solution Architect, Technical Architect or Platform Architect within complex enterprise environments.
• Experience designing shared platforms, enterprise services or reusable technology capabilities consumed by multiple applications or business areas.
• Strong Microsoft Azure architecture experience.
• Good understanding of modern cloud architecture, distributed systems and microservices.
• Strong understanding of integration architecture, APIs, messaging and event driven solutions.
• Experience producing high quality architecture artefacts including solution visions, options assessments, HLDs, architecture decisions, roadmaps and integration or data flow designs.
• Practical experience with non functional architecture including resilience, availability, performance, disaster recovery, security, observability and operational support.
• Experience working across multiple product and delivery teams rather than being limited to a single application or project.
• Experience working with enterprise architecture, cyber security, infrastructure, data and engineering functions.
• Ability to identify and manage architecture dependencies and technical debt.
• Experience presenting architecture proposals and decisions to technical governance or design authority forums.
• Good understanding of Agile and product based delivery.
• Strong stakeholder management and communication skills, including the ability to explain complex technical issues to non technical stakeholders.
• Ability to challenge constructively and make pragmatic architecture decisions that balance strategic direction with delivery needs.

Enterprise communications, media and collaboration Experience with enterprise communication and media technologies would be beneficial, including:

• Enterprise video and audio platforms
• Real-time communication and collaboration services
• Video conferencing and remote participation technologies
• Audio and video recording platforms
• Media streaming and distribution
• Secure storage and retrieval of recorded media
• Integration of audio/video capabilities with enterprise applications and digital services
• Monitoring, resilience and operational support for Real Time communication services

Technology experience You do not need to be an expert in every technology listed below. We are looking for broad architecture capability with strong experience across several of these areas:

• Microsoft Azure
• Azure API Management
• Azure Service Bus and asynchronous messaging
• REST APIs and API lifecycle management
• Microsoft Entra ID and modern identity patterns
• Azure data and analytics services
• Containers and Kubernetes
• Infrastructure as Code
• GitHub and Azure DevOps
• SaaS and COTS integration
• Monitoring and observability platforms such as Azure Monitor, Application Insights, Log Analytics, Dynatrace or Grafana
• Workflow and automation technologies
• Enterprise document, collaboration, publishing, scheduling or communication platforms

Desirable experience It would be advantageous to have:

• Experience delivering architecture within UK central government, justice, policing, defence, healthcare or another regulated public sector environment.
• Experience of national scale or business critical digital services.
• Experience working in a multi supplier environment.
• Experience modernising Legacy services while maintaining live operations.
• Experience integrating commercial SaaS or COTS platforms with bespoke digital services.
• Experience of enterprise architecture repositories such as Ardoq or similar tooling.
• Knowledge of UK Government Technology Code of Practice, Service Standard, Secure by Design principles or equivalent architecture and assurance frameworks.
• Experience delivering architecture in environments handling sensitive or regulated information.
• Existing SC security clearance.
• Experience applying reuse, convergence and modernisation principles, secure-by-design practice, and technical governance across multi-supplier delivery environments.