Service Architect

Lead Technical Recruiter (Cyber Security, Data & IT Operations) @ UK Home Office | HR, Recruiting, Hiring

Salary: £76,177 plus skills allowance of up to £13,700 pending assessment

Location: Sheffield (hybrid with 60% office attendance)

Advert Close: 12th January 2026 11:55pm

Please note that this role requires SC clearance, which would normally need 5 years’ UK residency in the past 5 years. Candidates must also hold or be prepared to undergo NPPV3 clearance.

Home Office Digital designs, builds and develops services for the rest of the department and for government. Every year our systems support up to 3 million visa applications, checks on 100 million border crossings, up to 8 million passport applications and deliver 140 million police checks on people, vehicles and property.

As a Service Architect
, you will design and deliver services that support business needs; reuse existing service components; be proportionate and affordable; and effectively span multiple suppliers, components, and support levels. You will produce comprehensive service designs, incorporating business requirements, wider standards, Enterprise Services capabilities and external suppliers. You will lead on programmes and projects of work, acting as a Subject Matter Expert and ensuring the design meets user and wider Home Office needs.

You will work within the Service Architecture, Design and Introduction (SADI) team but maintain close links to the wider Architecture cluster to keep abreast of industry best practice and standards and to ensure a coherent and consistent strategy across cyber, cloud, data centre, storage, network, mobile and the user experience of infrastructure.

• Ensure that service designs to support new services are comprehensive, efficient and reuses existing capability, determining the required resourcing for the transition pipeline and allocating resources accordingly, while ensuring suitable recharge agreements.
• Develop and document service designs for the integration and implementation of solutions, working across areas of the business to ensure requirements are included in business cases, project plans, supplier procurements and Service Design Packages.
• Exercise strong stakeholder management skills to drive completion of a service design, including brokering decisions and bridging technical and business disputes by weighing up risk, complexity impact and deliverability and presenting at senior stakeholder boards.
• Lead the evaluation of a new service once it has been integrated, identifying best practices and lessons learned to incorporate into future integration plans.
• Create detailed plans for the integration of new services into existing architecture, considering the broader context, strategies and operating model of the organisation, maintaining a transition pipeline within a given Portfolio or Product area with a forward view of two years.
• Define and help shape best practices and standards within Architecture and SADI teams, in line with continual service improvement.
• Review, negotiate, update and create Service Level and Operating Level Agreements (SLAs / OLAs).

• Evidencing strong process, technical and team leadership skills, with a passion for delivering leading‑edge designs and inspiring a culture of technical excellence and innovative solution design.
• Navigating the complex landscapes of technologies, 3rd‑party suppliers (driving the procurement process), internal and cross‑government teams.
• Managing and delivering complex service solutions within time, cost and quality targets, ensuring solutions are robust, resilient, and appropriately implemented, tested and documented.
• Defining standards, owning and contributing to the technical roadmap and strategy.
• Anticipating and advising on future technology changes that present opportunities for the product or service.
• Communicating clearly in a language which meets the needs of different users and stakeholders through selecting the appropriate channels and formats, and managing expectations whilst adapting to stakeholders’ reactions with flexibility.
• A Civil Service Pension with employer contribution rates of at least…