Architect (Software Development)

We're looking for an experienced Architect (Software Development) to provide technical leadership, architectural oversight and strategic direction across major software development, re-platforming and digital transformation initiatives. This is a high-impact leadership role where you'll guide technology choices, champion modern engineering practices and help deliver secure, scalable, digital services for our colleagues and tenants.

Reporting to the Director of Digital and Technology, you'll lead the architectural design and technical direction for software products and platforms, ensuring our solutions are secure, maintainable and aligned to our wider digital strategy and enterprise architecture. You'll also line manage and develop a small team of Software Developers, creating the conditions for high performance, continuous improvement and innovation.

• Lead architectural design and technical oversight for software re-platforming and digital transformation initiatives, applying secure-by-design and zero trust principles.
• Own architecture, tools and technology choices across digital products, ensuring solutions are scalable, reliable, secure and maintainable.
• Lead and develop a software development team, encouraging modern engineering practices, collaboration and continuous learning.
• Define and embed coding standards, architectural patterns, quality gates, CI/CD pipelines and Infrastructure as Code practices.
• Collaborate with Product, Design and delivery teams to shape technical roadmaps, assess feasibility, identify risks and support smooth agile delivery.
• Work closely with Cyber Security to ensure risk is understood, managed and designed into solutions from the outset.
• Review and assure code delivered by external providers before release into production, ensuring it meets architectural, security and quality expectations.
• Provide hands on expertise for live service support, including debugging, root cause analysis and resolution of complex technical issues.

You'll be an accomplished technical leader with solid experience in software architecture, solution design and modern software delivery. You'll bring the confidence to guide technical direction, the curiosity to explore better ways of working, and the communication skills to make complex technical concepts accessible to a range of stakeholders.

• Demonstrable experience designing software architecture and leading the delivery of scalable technical solutions.
• Proven track record of delivering large scale software modernisation, re-platforming or digital transformation programmes.
• Experience leading, coaching and developing software engineering teams in a technical leadership or management capacity.
• Evidence of using AI assisted software development tools (e.g. GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code or similar) to enhance development productivity and deliver.

You'll also be aware of accessibility standards such as WCAG and how to embed these into engineering practices.

As a smart working organisation, you can expect a balance of working from the office (Birmingham, Bath Row) and from home. Typically, you'll be working from the office 3 days per week and from home 2 days per week.

The closing date is Wednesday 5th August; however we encourage you to apply early as we may close before this date, dependent on the volume of applications we receive.