Lead Technical Architect - AI

Job summary

Defra is the UK government department responsible for safeguarding our natural environment, supporting our world-leading food and farming industry, and sustaining a thriving rural economy. Our broad remit means we play a major role in people's day-to-day life, from the food we eat, and the air we breathe, to the water we drink.

Digital, Data, Technology and Security (DDTS) is the trusted team for digital across the entire Defra Group.

We have around 1000 colleagues across DDTS and our ambition is to make it easier and faster than ever for people to interact with Defra. If you are ready to drive innovation and push boundaries, we want to hear from you. Join us and together we will create a great place for living, and a green and healthy future for all.

Find out more about DDTS:

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We are Government Digital and Data Candidate Information Pack V3 -

Please note for this role you will require SC Clearance. To gain SC clearance all applicants are required to have been a UK resident for a minimum of 5 years. If this requirement is not met, the individual will not be able to progress their application further.

Job description

The AI Technical Architect is responsible for defining, assuring and maintaining Defra’s technical architecture and approved design patterns for the use of artificial intelligence, including machine learning, generative and agentic AI systems. They will provide technical leadership and architectural oversight for AI-enabled systems, ensuring these are designed in line with HMG’s Digital and Data standards and departmental architecture principles.

The role will ensure AI solutions adopted or developed across the department are technically robust, secure, operable and reusable, while avoiding unnecessary duplication or unmanaged risk. This will be achieved by defining clear technical guardrails, reference architectures and design patterns that teams can adopt with confidence.

The role will broadly:

• Define and maintain Defra’s approved technical architecture and guardrails for AI
• Enable delivery teams to design AI systems that are secure, sustainable, ethical and interoperable
• Provide architectural assurance and expert technical advice for AI initiatives
• Reduce risk, duplication and technical debt associated with AI adoption
• Support responsible and proportionate innovation in the use of AI

Person specification

Responsibilities:

• Define, document and maintain AI technical reference architectures, standards and design patterns, covering areas such as cloud deployment, data access, security controls, model lifecycle management, evaluation, and monitoring.
• Provide architectural advice and assurance to AI-related initiatives, including participation in design reviews, assurance clinics and architectural governance forums.
• Work with Digital Delivery teams to support early-stage discovery and design of AI use cases, ensuring alignment with approved technical patterns.
• Collaborate with wider CTO (Chief Technology Officer), Digital Delivery, Digital Transformation, GIO (Group Infrastructure Operations) and Chief Data Office areas to ensure AI architectures are aligned with enterprise architecture, infrastructure standards and operational requirements.
• Embed responsible AI principles into technical designs by specifying appropriate technical controls such as logging, auditability, performance evaluation and human oversight.

Skills:

• Ability to lead complex technical decision-making, balancing trade-offs between cost, risk, performance and sustainability.
• Ability to translate organisational strategy into coherent technical architecture and long-term direction for AI systems.
• Ensures architecture supports systems from discovery through to live operation, including deployment, monitoring and scaling.
• Ability to embed security, identity, access control and compliance into architectural patterns.
• Design architectures for data pipelines, model lifecycle management, evaluation and monitoring of AI systems.
• Architectural assurance skills, including assessment of designs against standards, identification of risk and recommendation of mitigations.

Demonstrable skills/experience aligned to the Lead Technical Architect (G7) role (technical skills outlined below), within the Government Digital and Data Profession, specialising in AI and data-driven architectures:

• Architect for the whole context: practitioner level
• Architecture communication: expert level
• Community collaboration: practitioner level
• Making architectural decisions: practitioner level
• Strategy design: practitioner level
• Technical design throughout the life cycle: expert level

For further information on these technical skills please refer to the framework.

Experience:

• Technical architecture design experience for complex, cloud-based digital systems (primarily Azure and AWS), including distributed and data-intensive architectures.
• Secure-by-design architecture design experience, including identity and access management, encryption, logging, auditability and resilience.
• Deep understanding of AI/ML system components and lifecycle, including data pipelines, model development, MCP (Model Context Protocol), agentic workflows, model orchestration, deployment, evaluation, continuous monitoring and retirement.
• Experience working with cloud-native and data-intensive systems and systems with high availability, security or regulatory requirements.

Selection process

The Civil Service marks each element of the selection process on a merit basis. You can visit the gov.uk website for further information on the Civil Service rating scale.

Ensure you have tailored your CV and Personal Statement to the 'skills and experience' section of the job advert by providing examples on how you are suitable for the role using the STAR method.

Please ensure you demonstrate clearly, within your personal statement, how you meet these requirements, as the information you provide will form a key part when the panel is scoring your application.

For further information on STAR, you can check out our Hints and Tips document.

Application process

As part of the application process, you will be assessed on