Senior Solutions Architect - Government Digital Service - G7

Location:

Bristol, London, Manchester

The Government Digital Service (GDS) is the digital centre of government. We are responsible for setting, leading and delivering the vision for a modern digital government.

Our priorities are to drive a modern digital government by:

• joining up public sector services
• harnessing the power of AI for the public good
• strengthening and extending our digital and data public infrastructure
• elevating leadership and investing in talent
• funding for outcomes and procuring for growth and innovation
• committing to transparency and driving accountability

We are home to the Incubator for Artificial Intelligence (I.AI), the world‑leading  and at the forefront of coordinating the UK’s geospatial strategy and activity. We lead the Government Digital and Data function and champion the work of digital teams across government.

We’re part of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) and employ more than 1,000 people all over the UK, with hubs in Manchester, London and Bristol.

The Government Digital Service is where talent translates into impact. From your first day, you’ll be working with some of the world’s most highly‑skilled digital professionals, all contributing their knowledge to make change on a national scale.

Join us for rewarding work that makes a difference across the UK. You'll solve some of the nation’s highest‑priority digital challenges, helping millions of people access services they need.

The Spend Assurance team leads the assurance of digital delivery plans across central government. Before 1 April, its primary objective was to enforce compliance with government digital policy and standards through control gates and approvals on behalf of Ministers. Its focus has now shifted to helping the most important public sector services access the insight, assurance and support they need to make better decisions earlier and deliver more effectively across the digital lifecycle, ensuring citizens, businesses and staff experience better public services sooner.

• Supporting the Chief Secretary to the Treasury (CST) to make well‑informed decisions on digital delivery by providing access to digital expertise through integrated assurance
• Working with departmental assurance colleagues to improve their approaches, enabling faster delivery while managing risk effectively
• Acting as a critical friend to digital teams, offering independent challenge to avoid groupthink and blind spots
• Maintaining a strategic understanding of delivery across organisations to support more effective performance conversations in Digital Business Reviews (DBRs)
• Generating and sharing insights from delivery activity across government
• Connecting teams undertaking similar work to spread knowledge and lessons
• Signposting delivery teams to the support and interventions they need to solve problems

• Alignment with strategic objectives: understanding how initiatives contribute to organisational and cross‑government strategies, identifying tensions and trade‑offs, and helping decision‑makers strike the right balance
• Alignment with standards: understanding how standards and the Technology Code of Practice apply, and where trade‑offs may be necessary to support successful delivery while continuing to meet legal requirements
• Avoiding duplication: identifying opportunities to reuse existing capability, components, patterns or knowledge to accelerate delivery, while managing the risks created by dependencies, and
• Meeting outcomes: understanding the intended change or result beyond outputs and assessing whether delivery plans provide a credible route to realising those outcomes early and incrementally.

The service team is small, comprising 4 Senior Advisors and a Head of Spend Assurance, with 2 further advisor roles being recruited via this campaign. Given the scale and ambition of the team’s objectives, close collaboration with other teams is essential. We also use an “AI in Assurance” product that enables us to access useful insight more quickly.

In integrated assurance, we work as part of a multidisciplinary…