Enterprise Architect

Job description

Job Title:

Enterprise Architect

Contract type:
Permanent

Location:

London or Newcastle with a minimum of 2 days per week in the office in line with our hybrid working policy.

Salary:
Newcastle:
Salary- c £61,250;
London Salary
-c £70,000more may be available for exceptional candidates

The National Audit Office (NAO) is the UK’s main public sector audit body. Independent of government, we have responsibility for auditing the accounts of various public sector bodies, examining the propriety of government spending, assessing risks to financial control and accountability, and reviewing the economy, efficiency and effectiveness of programmes, projects, and activities.

The NAO’s Digital Services (DS) function is seeking an Enterprise Architect responsible for bridging the gap between our business strategy and technology execution. This pivotal role involves overseeing the organisation's technology landscape, ensuring that systems, data, and processes align seamlessly to support the NAO's overarching goals. The Enterprise Architect will be instrumental in mapping the current tech stack, reducing technical complexity, and establishing robust architecture governance.

Crucially, this role will support the Data and AI team by providing the enterprise architecture standards, patterns, and integration guidance needed to help deliver the data strategy. The postholder will work collaboratively with Data and AI leadership, taking strategic direction on domain-specific requirements while ensuring the wider technology landscape remains coherent, secure, scalable, and aligned to organisational priorities.

• Align overarching technology strategy with the NAO’s business goals and objectives.
• Develop and maintain the architectural roadmap, mapping the transition from current state to future state.
• Audit existing technology stacks to reduce complexity, identify redundancies, and consolidate tools where appropriate.
• Establish, mature, and govern the rules, frameworks, standards, processes, and practices for how technology is acquired, designed, built, reviewed, and deployed across the organisation, including through wider Architecture Review Board and Design Authority activities.
• Partner closely with the Data & AI team to ope rationalise the data strategy, taking their lead on domain-specific requirements to provide supportive enterprise-level architecture.
• Continuously scan the horizon for emerging technologies (e.g., advanced cloud capabilities) to assess their value for the organisation. This role reports into the Head of Audit Technology.

• Developing and maintaining comprehensive enterprise architecture models, diagrams, and target-state designs.
• Aligning technology investments with business strategy to ensure value delivery and operational efficiency.
• Auditing the current technology stack to identify redundancies, opportunities for consolidation, and areas to reduce technical debt.
• Establishing and applying architectural standards, governance frameworks, and best practices across technology domains.
• Partnering with the Data & AI team to support their data strategy.
• Evaluating emerging technologies to determine their potential value and applicability to the NAO’s objectives.
• Collaborating with cross-functional teams—including solution architects, developers, security, and business stakeholders—to ensure cohesive enterprise solutions that meet organisational needs.
• Taking an active role in wider Architecture Review Board and Design Authority activities, providing architectural governance, assurance, challenge, and oversight across programmes and change initiatives.
• Maturing the NAO’s enterprise architecture processes, practices, artefacts, and engagement model so that architectural guidance is practical, proportionate, repeatable, and embedded in delivery ways of working.
• Working with the Data Architect to produce and publish an enterprise data architecture blueprint that aligns data management, integration, governance, and platform choices with the NAO’s wider enterprise architecture standards.
• Support the Data and AI team to align the data…