Solution Architect (.NET

Position: Solution Architect (.NET Applications)

The team you’ll be working with

We’re hiring experienced, pragmatic and collaborative Solution Architects to shape and deliver national‑scale digital, data and technology services across UK government. You’ll work with multi‑disciplinary agile teams, make smart architectural decisions, and help our customers deliver secure, reliable and user‑centred services in the cloud.

While we work polyglot, this role leans .NET/C# to support upcoming programmes.

If you’ve delivered systems for organisations such as the Home Office, Ministry of Justice or Ministry of Defence, fantastic; we also welcome candidates with transferable experience from complex, regulated environments.

What you’ll be doing

You may embed within an agile team or lead across several squads. You will:

• Provide hands‑on technical leadership to design and deliver secure, resilient solutions.
• Shape the architecture for new products and programmes, selecting fit‑for‑purpose approaches and technologies.
• Lead solution design across domains (applications, data, integration, cloud, security), creating clear roadmaps and decision records.
• Balance user needs, value, cost and risk with product, delivery and engineering peers.
• Communicate complex topics clearly, from the C‑suite to engineers, and build trusted relationships with senior stakeholders.
• Guide engineering practices (CI/CD, testability, operability, observability) to reduce risk and increase delivery velocity.
• Contribute to bids and estimates, aligning solutions to public sector standards and constraints.
• Champion governance and assurance aligned to GDS, NCSC guidance and the Technology Code of Practice (where applicable).

What experience you’ll bring

We care about your approach as much as your toolkit. You:

• Think in systems, design for change and make evidence‑based trade‑offs.
• Are comfortable moving between strategy and hands‑on detail.
• Excel in stakeholder engagement and management across policy, operations and technology.
• Collaborate openly in multi‑supplier environments.
• Keep users, security and operability front and centre, and write things down (standards, ADRs, risks, diagrams).

Skills & experience we value

You don’t need everything here; if you have most of it (or strong potential to learn), we’d love to hear from you.

National‑scale public services

• Experience delivering national scale systems and services, ideally with departments such as the Home Office, MoJ or MoD.
• Broad expertise across integration and messaging, digital services, case management, data integration, with up‑to‑date awareness of emerging approaches.

Cloud & platform

• Strong knowledge of cloud‑based services and cloud‑native solutions on at least one major platform (Azure preferred; AWS/GCP also valued).
• Common services: containers/Kubernetes/Open Shift, serverless (e.g., Azure Functions), networking, identity, storage, and IaC; automation and cost optimisation.

Applications & integration (.NET‑focused)

• Designing modern application architectures: microservices, event‑driven and API‑led.
• .NET/C#, ASP.NET Core, Web APIs, gRPC; API management; messaging/streaming (e.g., Kafka, Service Bus, Event Hubs); contracts and documentation (OpenAPI/Swagger).
• Familiarity with front‑end integration patterns and modern SPAs (e.g., React) is a bonus.

Data & stores

• Selecting appropriate persistence: relational (e.g., SQL Server, Postgre
  
  SQL), No
  
  SQL (e.g., Cosmos DB, Dynamo
  
  DB), caching (e.g., Redis).
• Data integration, quality, lineage and privacy‑by‑design.

Engineering & Dev Ops

• CI/CD (Azure Dev Ops, Git Hub Actions or Git Lab), Git, automated testing, security scanning, containers and infrastructure as code.
• Observability: logging, metrics, tracing, SLO/SLA thinking; designing for operability and support.

Security & assurance

• Delivering solutions with strict security controls
  , including environments where external security assurance is mandated.
• Building security into designs (threat modelling, identity and access, secrets management, encryption in transit/at rest).

Methods & communication

• Clear modelling and communication (C4/UML), option analysis and trade‑off records.
• Creating architecture roadmaps and contributing to business cases.

Nice to have

• Experience with…