Architecture assurance guidance & standards management Job London area,Greater London England UK,Design & Architecture

Location: Greater London

About the role

Define, maintain and operate enterprise architecture standards, guidance, assurance and governance forums that enable safe, consistent and scalable delivery across D&T, while reducing architectural risk, technical debt and decision ambiguity.

Scope

Enterprise-wide, not domain-specific, operating horizontally across all technology and solution domains. This role does not design or deliver systems.

Core scope areas

Enterprise architecture standards and reference architectures
Architecture guidance and "minimum viable architecture" guardrails
Architecture assurance for programmes, platforms and major investments
Architecture governance forums and decision processes
Architecture risk, resilience and technical debt reporting
Architecture artefacts, documentation and playbooks

Key accountabilities

The Architecture Assurance, Guidance & Standards Management Lead is accountable for:

Defining and maintaining clear, consumable enterprise architecture standards and reference architectures.
Operating a consistent architecture assurance model that provides confidence in key initiatives and investments.
Chairing and running enterprise architecture governance forums, ensuring decisions are high-quality, transparent and actionable.
Ensuring architecture standards and decisions are applied and followed through, not just agreed.
Providing independent architectural risk and resilience insight to senior D&T and governance forums.

Key responsibilities

Enterprise Architecture Standards & Guardrails:
Own and maintain enterprise-wide architecture principles, standards and reference architecture artefacts. Ensure standards are practical and easy to apply, proportionate to risk, focused on enablement rather than control. Regularly refresh standards to reflect changes in platforms, operating model and delivery approach.

Architecture Governance Forums (Chairing & Operation):
Chair enterprise architecture governance and assurance forums on behalf of the Technology Domain Architect. Set clear agendas aligned to assurance objectives and decision needs. Ensure the right materials are brought forward for decision, not discussion without outcome. Facilitate focused, fact-based decision-making and challenge where required.

Forum Preparation & Decision Quality:
Work with architects and delivery teams to prepare architecture submissions for forums, ensuring decisions are well‑framed options and trade-offs are clear; alignment to standards and principles is explicit; improve the quality and consistency of architectural decision inputs over time.

Minutes, Actions & Follow‑Through:
Capture clear, outcome-led meeting minutes, including decisions taken, conditions or constraints, architecture risks accepted or deferred; track architecture actions arising from forums and ensure accountable owners are assigned; follow up on actions to ensure decisions are implemented, not forgotten, feeding outcomes back into assurance and standards where necessary.

Architecture Assurance Framework:
Define and operate when and how architecture assurance is required across programmes and investments. Apply assurance proportionately, balancing speed vs. risk, autonomy vs. enterprise consistency. Escalate material architecture risks through appropriate governance channels.

Risk, Resilience & Technical Debt Insight:
Aggregate assurance outcomes to provide enterprise-level visibility of systemic architectural risk, recurring deviations from standards, structural resilience and dependency weaknesses. Produce concise, decision-led insights for senior governance forums.

"Freedom Within Guardrails":
Enablement—Translate strategy into minimum viable architectures and guardrails that enable teams to move quickly without repeated escalation. Reduce ambiguity by making "what is allowed" as clear as "what is not".

Architecture Community & Ways of Working:
Act as a central reference point for architecture governance, standards and assurance guidance across D&T. Coach architects on how to engage effectively with governance forums and assurance processes. Drive continuous improvement of architecture ways of working.

What good looks like

Architecture forums are well‑run,…