Lead Architect

£700 per day, Inside IR35 — Automation and AI Estate — Central Government

THE ROLE

Most lead architect contracts are about depth in one technology. This one is not, and the client has been explicit about it: they want a generalist, not a deep technical specialist, and the soft skills matter more than the technical ones. The estate is an automation and AI capability that has been built process by process for several years and has, in their own words, grown arms and legs. Your job is to bring it back together into something coherent, and to arbitrate between the automations already running in live service and the queue of new demand behind them. That means holding a room where people have strong and directly opposing views, in an organisation with its own internal politics, and landing a decision anyway. If you are the architect people send into the difficult meeting, this is that role.

YOU WILL

• Bring together an architecture that has grown organically over several years, giving it coherence without stopping the work that depends on it
• Arbitrate between live services and new demand, balancing a strategic view against what is actually deliverable
• Deconflict in an environment where clients hold strong opposing opinions, against a background of internal politics
• Translate in both directions, so that business stakeholders understand the technology decisions and technologists understand the business constraints
• Lead as an independent voice rather than as a vehicle for anyone's commercial targets

WHAT THEY ARE LOOKING FOR

• Genuine arbitration and deconfliction experience. Mergers, divestments, carve-outs, multi-supplier disputes, chairing a design authority where a decision had to be forced. Being present at governance forums is not the same thing
• Bringing a sprawling estate back together. Rationalisation, consolidation, architecture maturity uplift, reducing complexity that accumulated rather than being designed
• Fluency in business and technology both. Business cases, investment appraisal, benefits and budgets, alongside real architecture
• End-to-end breadth across cloud, data, integration, security, applications and infrastructure. A deep specialist in any one of these is not what this role wants
• Delivery inside UK central government — a department, an arm's length body or a devolved administration. This is a requirement, not a preference
• The ability to be the lead badge in the room without selling anything

ADVANTAGEOUS

• Robotic process automation or intelligent automation estates, and UiPath in particular
• AWS
• DWP specifically
• Experience of a centre of excellence serving competing internal business areas with finite build capacity
• Architecture modelling tooling and a method for making a target state legible to non-architects

THE DETAILS

Location: Newcastle, 2 days per week on site

Duration: To be confirmed

Contract: Inside IR35 Start: As soon as onboarding allows

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