Principal Solutions Architect

Principal Solution Architect

Salary: £100,000-£130,000 + benefits
Location: Hampshire (on-site – Hybrid)
Type: Permanent, full-time
Clearance: SC (Minimum)

Overview

We’re hiring a Principal Solution Architect (SFIA 6) to join a Central Government architecture practice, supporting digital programmes.

You’ll provide early design leadership, shape ideas into viable solution approaches, and ensure alignment to architectural standards and strategic direction. This is a stakeholder-heavy role, requiring confidence and credibility working with senior military officers (e.g., OF5/Colonel level). Modelling skills are useful, but not essential-the emphasis is on judgement, communication, and architectural coherence.

Ideal background: ex-military officer / serving reservist (or strong military domain understanding).

What you’ll be doing

• Act as the initial architectural engagement for incoming Army projects, providing early guidance and shaping proposals.
• Translate business intent and user needs into high-level solution architectures for delivery teams and client stakeholders.
• Own architectural integrity across delivery-balancing time, cost, quality, risk, sustainability, reuse, and scalability.
• Coordinate and manage target architecture across multiple initiatives, ensuring consistency and standards adherence.
• Lead solution design for large/complex modernisation and migration programmes (including legacy services).
• Define and manage requirements and scoping (functional and non-functional) for high-complexity initiatives.
• Produce and communicate high-level artefacts; document architecturally significant decisions and trade-offs.
• Provide technical leadership across secure delivery, including secure SDLC principles and best-practice security design.
• Contribute to bid/proposal work: pre-sales architecture, estimation, planning, demonstrations, and proposition development.
• Mentor and develop internal architecture capability-standards, ways of working, coaching junior architects.

Essential experience & competencies

• Senior-level solution architecture experience aligned to SFIA level 6.
• Proven ability to engage and influence senior stakeholders (technical and non-technical), including leading robust, constructive discussions.
• Experience delivering complex technology services across the lifecycle, in multi-disciplinary environments.
• Strong grounding in secure engineering and security best practice (e.g., secure SDLC, OWASP, NCSC cloud principles).
• Comfort operating with ambiguity at the front end of initiatives-able to shape early ideas into coherent architectural direction.
• Excellent communication: able to present options, trade-offs, and recommendations clearly.

Desirable

• Experience in secure environments and/or Central Government / Defence.
• Active SC clearance
• Enterprise architecture frameworks (e.g., TOGAF, Zachman).
• Exposure to architecture tooling (e.g., Sparx Enterprise Architect).
• Cloud (Azure/AWS), DevOps/CI/CD, integration patterns (APIs/streaming), IAM (SAML/OAuth/OIDC/AD), microservices.
• Experience delivering data and/or AI-enabled solutions.
• Agile delivery experience.