Senior Technical Architect

Contract: Initial 6 months
Rate: Outside IR35
Security clearance requirements: BPSS level

Storm ID is an award-winning Edinburgh-based digital transformation consultancy that helps organisations accelerate their use of digital, data and AI. We believe in tailored solutions, assembling expert teams to address each client's unique needs. Our services span strategy, design, technology and data & AI, ensuring seamless end-to-end delivery of platforms, products and services with real-world impact.

Role Overview

Storm ID has delivered the Alpha phase of a prominent Scottish Government digital transformation programme. The work is focused on shaping and validating an end-to-end service model, including service mapping, early-stage integration activity and the development of an initial working capability within a secure test environment.

The programme includes multiple related delivery streams being delivered by a mixed supplier and Scottish Government team. These streams cover user-facing digital journeys, supporting content and information architecture, and the underpinning service model and technical approach required to enable future phases.

That architecture is documented in both a PoC High Level Design and Full-Service High-Level Design, supported by Architecture Decision Records.
The next phase requires:

• one or more iterations of the Full Service HLD based on a re-evaluation of technical and integration constraints.
• a body of options papers and ADRs that show the reasoning, alternatives and trade-offs behind each decision before the decision is written up.
• integration strategies for each justice partner that are specific to that partner's systems, appetite and supplier landscape.
• low level design of sufficient depth to assure, cost, plan and build a Beta.

Essential skills and experience

• Substantial experience as a technical architect on complex, integration-heavy digital services, with a track record of designs that were successfully delivered.
• Demonstrable ownership of HLD and LLD artefacts through multiple iterations and formal architectural assurance, in a governed public sector or comparably regulated environment.
• Deep, practical systems integration expertise: event-driven and message-based architecture, service buses, asynchronous patterns, idempotency, replay, dead-lettering, eventual consistency, change data capture and reconciliation.
• Strong API design and integration with legacy and third-party systems that you do not control and cannot change.
• Data architecture: modelling, entity correlation and matching across systems without shared identifiers, data quality, migration and seeding, retention and deletion.
• Cloud architecture on Azure — networking, identity, data services, messaging, secrets, IaC and CI/CD; ability to size and cost a workload.
• Security and privacy by design: authentication and identity (OIDC/OAuth2, federated identity), threat modelling, data protection and information governance for sensitive personal data.
• Written argument. Options papers, ADRs and design documents that a sceptical technical reviewer can follow and act on.
• Stakeholder credibility. Able to hold a design position under sustained challenge from an assurance function, concede accurately when the challenge is right, and negotiate with partner organisations whose interests are not aligned with the programme's.

Desirable skills and experience

• Experience in the justice, policing or public safety sector
• Familiarity with Scottish Government common components; ScotAccount, Digital Mailbox, SG Cloud Platform, Scottish Government Design System and the Digital Scotland Service Standard.
• Experience designing services for vulnerable users
• Experience with viewpoint-based architecture description (Rozanski & Woods or similar) and with C4 or equivalent modelling.
• Multi-organisation programme experience where architectural progress depends on organisational agreement