Lead Technical Architect - AI

Defra is the UK government department responsible for safeguarding our natural environment, supporting our world-leading food and farming industry, and sustaining a thriving rural economy. Our broad remit means we play a major role in people’s day-to-day life, from the food we eat, and the air we breathe, to the water we drink., The AI Technical Architect is responsible for defining, assuring and maintaining Defra’s technical architecture and approved design patterns for the use of artificial intelligence, including machine learning, generative and agentic AI systems. They will provide technical leadership and architectural oversight for AI-enabled systems, ensuring these are designed in line with HMG’s Digital and Data standards and departmental architecture principles.

The role will ensure AI solutions adopted or developed across the department are technically robust, secure, operable and reusable, while avoiding unnecessary duplication or unmanaged risk. This will be achieved by defining clear technical guardrails, reference architectures and design patterns that teams can adopt with confidence.

The role will broadly:

• Define and maintain Defra’s approved technical architecture and guardrails for AI
• Enable delivery teams to design AI systems that are secure, sustainable, ethical and interoperable
• Provide architectural assurance and expert technical advice for AI initiatives
• Reduce risk, duplication and technical debt associated with AI adoption
• Support responsible and proportionate innovation in the use of AI, * Define, document and maintain AI technical reference architectures, standards and design patterns, covering areas such as cloud deployment, data access, security controls, model lifecycle management, evaluation, and monitoring.
• Provide architectural advice and assurance to AI-related initiatives, including participation in design reviews, assurance clinics and architectural governance forums.
• Work with Digital Delivery teams to support early-stage discovery and design of AI use cases, ensuring alignment with approved technical patterns.
• Collaborate with wider CTO (Chief Technology Officer), Digital Delivery, Digital Transformation, GIO (Group Infrastructure Operations) and Chief Data Office areas to ensure AI architectures are aligned with enterprise architecture, infrastructure standards and operational requirements.
• Embed responsible AI principles into technical designs by specifying appropriate technical controls such as logging, auditability, performance evaluation and human oversight., We’ll assess you against these behaviours during the selection process:
• Making Effective Decisions
• Communicating and Influencing
• Delivering at Pace, We’ll assess you against these technical skills during the selection process:
• Architect for the whole context: practitioner level
• Architecture communication: expert level
• Community collaboration: practitioner level
• Making architectural decisions: practitioner level
• Strategy design: practitioner level
• Technical design throughout the life cycle: expert level, Where the location is ‘National’ the successful appointee should discuss and agree an appropriate contractual location in line with both Defra’s location policy and site capacity, prior to proceeding with pre-employment processes.

The agreed amount of time spent at a workplace for this post will reflect the requirement for Civil Servants to spend at least 60% of their working time in an organisation workplace with the option to work the remaining time flexibly from home. Working time spent at a workplace may include time spent at other organisational locations including field-based operational locations, together with supplier, customer or partner locations. This is a non-contractual agreement which is consistent with common Civil Service expectations.

Travel costs to non-contractual workplaces will be subject to departmental travel and subsistence policies. Travel costs to contractual workplaces are the responsibility of the employee.

The successful candidate is required to carry out all their duties from a UK location, and cannot do so from an overseas location at any time.

Defra includes the core department, APHA, RPA, Cefas and VMD.

Reserve list

A reserve list may be held for a period of 12 months from which further appointments can be made.

Near miss

Candidates who are judged to be a near miss at interview may be considered for other positions in Defra which may be at a lower grade, but have a potential skills match., If a person with disabilities is put at a substantial disadvantage compared to a non-disabled person, we have a duty to make reasonable changes to our processes., * 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)
• 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

• Ability to lead complex technical decision-making, balancing trade-offs between cost, risk, performance and sustainability.
• Ability to translate organisational strategy into coherent technical architecture and long-term direction for AI systems.
• Ensures architecture supports systems from discovery through to live operation, including deployment, monitoring and scaling.
• Ability to embed security, identity, access control and compliance into architectural patterns.
• Design architectures for data pipelines, model lifecycle management, evaluation and monitoring of AI systems.
• Architectural assurance skills, including assessment of designs against standards, identification of risk and recommendation of mitigations.

Demonstrable skills/experience aligned to the Lead Technical Architect (G7) role (technical skills outlined below), within the Government Digital and Data Profession, specialising in AI and data-driven architectures:

• Architect for the whole context: practitioner level
• Architecture communication: expert level
• Community collaboration: practitioner level
• Making architectural decisions: practitioner level
• Strategy design: practitioner level
• Technical design throughout the life cycle: expert level, * Technical architecture design experience for complex, cloud-based digital systems (primarily Azure and AWS), including distributed and data-intensive architectures.
• Secure-by-design architecture design experience, including identity and access management, encryption, logging, auditability and resilience.
• Deep understanding of AI/ML system components and lifecycle, including data pipelines, model development, MCP (Model Context Protocol), agentic workflows, model orchestration, deployment, evaluation, continuous monitoring and retirement.
• Experience working with cloud-native and data-intensive systems and systems with high availability, security or regulatory requirements., This vacancy is using Success Profiles , and will assess your Behaviours, Strengths, Experience and Technical skills., Please take note that Defra does not hold a UK Visa & Immigration (UKVI) Skilled Worker License sponsor and are unable to sponsor any individuals for Skilled Worker Sponsorship., Successful candidates must undergo a basic (or equivalent) criminal record check. Successful candidates must meet the security requirements before they can be appointed. The level of security needed is security check .

£56,375 - £69,105 Grade 7 National: £56,375 - £62,830 London: £62,000 - £69,105, plus industry leading pension and benefits.

For details of our pay on appointment policy, please see below under the heading ‘Salary’.

This post offers successful candidates the opportunity to be considered for an additional Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) Skills Supplement. The level of the awarded supplement is determined following a separate skills assessment process, the outcome of which has no impact on the decision to make a job offer. This digital capability supplement ranges from £0 to £26,608 and you may be awarded a pay supplement within this range based on results of your additional skills assessment. For details of our pay on appointment policy, please see below under the heading ‘Salary’. A Civil Service Pension with an employer contribution of 28.97% GBP, Alongside your salary of £56,375, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs contributes £16,331 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides .

• 25 days leave (rising to 30 days over 5 years) plus bank holidays.

• A Civil Service pension with an average employer contribution of 28.97%.
• A day off per year for the King’s birthday.
• Access to a range of retail discounts (these include supermarket, tech, gym, holiday, phone and more).
• Flexible working options such as condensed hours, part-time and flexi time.
• 3 paid volunteering days per year.
• Funding for professional membership of a recognised professional body.
• Learning and development tailored to your role and budget for training or qualifications.
• A culture encouraging inclusion and diversity.
• Cycle to work scheme.
• Health cash plan to help you manage health costs for a reduced monthly fee.
• Access to the Employee Assistance Programme open 24 hours, 7 days a week, that provides support to you during any times of stress or difficulty.
• Free access to Headspace for wellbeing.
• Season ticket loan for public transport., New entrants to the Civil Service are expected to start on the minimum of the pay band. The internal roles rules apply to existing Civil Servants, i.e. level transfers move on current salary or the pay range minimum, transfers on promotion move to new pay range minimum or receive 10% increase. Either case is determined by whichever is the highest.

We have around 1000 colleagues across DDTS and our ambition is to make it easier and faster than ever for people to interact with Defra. If you are ready to drive innovation and push boundaries, we want to hear from you. Join us and together we will create a great place for living, and a green and healthy future for all.