Solutions Architect

Please note, this role is homebased, with 1 – 2 days per month travel to the London Stratford Office.

Sponsorship – We can support Skilled Worker Sponsorship for this post subject to candidates meeting the required eligibility for a Skilled Worker Visa.   However, please note the post is UK based and relocation support is not available.

Are you committed to helping us regulate health and social care within England?

When thinking about what drives you every day in your job, what keeps you motivated and passionate about your work what comes to mind?  For 3000+ people at the CQC we end each day knowing that we have made a difference to the lives of those most in need in our communities.  We make sure health and social care services provide people with safe, effective, compassionate, high-quality care and encourage care services to improve.  We are looking for people who are caring, demonstrate integrity and work well as part of a team to join with us and share in this sense of achievement.  If you would like to help us make a positive impact to health and social care within England, then read on.

Technology is key to the delivery of CQC’s core values. Our Technology team does what matters most by providing high quality, customer centric technology solutions and services to CQC colleagues, providers and the public through the use of modern, agile and innovative technologies including Dynamics 365 (CE, F&O), Azure Integration Services, Azure IDAM etc.   

Technology makes a difference; it speeds processes up, enables quicker more efficient communication and working, enabling colleagues to make quicker decisions which translate into better regulation of services.

By taking your next career step with us, you become a part of a team that designs, builds and maintains the organisation’s digital infrastructure all whilst giving you the opportunity to build an enviable career in an organisation that values Diversity, Learning and Development and supports colleagues to be the best they can be, all while working on some fantastic projects including; Transforming how we regulate by building new technology for registration, assessment and provider-self-service; Bringing in a new CQC website and intranet, and replacing our HR and Finance systems; Making changes to IT systems that implement continuous improvement or respond to need and making available an always-on comprehensive IT support service.   

Why this could be a great role for you….

You’ll work closely with a variety of people translating business thinking into technical designs, ensuring that the solutions are aligned to organisational strategy and objectives as well as Government Digital Service standards, you will see the impact of your work, and get feedback directly from users.

You will have the opportunity to shape and evolve CQC’s technology estate through continued delivery of excellence. You will have a unique opportunity to understand the Regulatory Framework and work with the leading business minds in this space to truly make a difference to the regulation of Health & Social Care in England.

A chance to work collaboratively with departments and multidisciplinary teams sharing your Agile and other methods experience together with your understanding of ‘service design’, your opinion will be valued.

What you will bring…

An ability to Design technical services or plan system integration, selecting and designing necessary platforms and technologies to meet project requirements and user needs and Lead evaluation, design and analysis of CQC wide solutions and propose solution recommendations and alternatives to satisfy customer needs. 

Support to the design and transition from legacy technologies/brownfield estates to modern, flexible and scalable architectures. 

Encourage communication across development teams to identify strategic requirements and dependencies. 

Design of the End-to-End solutions including multiple technical domains (Hosting, Data, Application, Integration and security). 

You will enable a positive technical culture, applying agile methods to development and completing quality assurance practices. Working closely with Business Analysts and Product managers to build the requirements and advising Product Managers on the estimated effort and technical implications of current user stories, as well as those in the backlog.

Accountabilities:

·       Use advanced theoretical and practical skills acquired through experience, specialist training and applied research to design and deliver robust, resilient, fit-for-purpose technology design aligned to user-needs.

·       Maintain a blueprint of the implementation of components of the digital strategy including technology choices, design patterns, processes, information architecture to ensure that the component systems work together as a whole

·       Ensure appropriate controls are in place for development efforts (internal and external) to ensure compliance with architectural thinking and agreed design patterns within their sphere of influence.

·       Work across the Digital function developing and assuring the solution design to meet user needs in line with business strategy and digital transformation efforts. Develop a strategic and technical roadmap including architecture transition states for the implementation of new services, their integration with legacy and the decommissioning of replaced solutions

·       Through personal specialist knowledge, bring together technology, business strategy, operational resilience, user focused design and financial planning to lay out a clear blueprint and delivery plan to implement products within their sphere of influence

·       With the Data Architect, own and maintain the enterprise level conceptual, logical and physical data model for the required information systems

·       Champion and implement agile development and service design practices in line with the CQC development approach and iterative user-focused development

·       Lead the development of a robust and resilient enterprise architecture, encompassing data, service, business and solution architectures

·       Facilitate cross team working and joint problem solving to support organisational needs to enable the CQC to become intelligence led with understanding built on data

·       Responsible as technical liaison, for working across technical and business functions, to translate business objectives and detailed functional and non-requirements in to scalable, supportable data and development practices

·       Responsible for providing expert advice and guidance to business and analytics teams, employing extensive technical knowledge, to ensure that available solutions are understood and selected appropriately given time, cost and quality expectations

·       Contribute to the design of and adhere to software development standards and methodologies and ensure systems are well-designed, developed and tested;

·       Responsible for ensuing solution architecture documentation is produced as per enterprise architecture standards and kept up to date at an appropriate level of detail

·       Responsible for producing the relevant papers for governance approvals as required

·       Mentor development staff to share knowledge and upskill staff, assisting them with personal, technical and professional development;

·       Establish continuous improvement projects to constantly improve ways of working across the team and organisation using Quality Improvement ideas, lean methods and peer review;

·       Ensuring that any 3rd party consulting engagements are leveraging existing assets, tools and standards and that there are clear transitions plans for IT support

·       Work across the organisation to ensure architectural disciplines, principles and standards are well understood, implemented and effectively supported to ensure consistency with the overall roadmap and enterprise architecture

·       Champion the delivery of CQC’s agile delivery methods and practices, focussing on delivering a responsive, customer focused delivery approach.

• Engage with business colleagues across operational and strategic teams, developing and maintaining a clear understanding of CQC’s strategic objectives and the associated Digital contribution.
• Contribute to strong leadership about equality and human rights as an overarching subject, feeling comfortable and confident in discussing and checking the work within the team.
• Have the appropriate knowledge, skills and experience to actively promote diversity and equality of opportunity, treat everyone with dignity and respect and avoid unlawful discrimination

Skills & Experience

·       Experience of working at a senior level in a specialist area and educated to degree level or Master’s level (desirable)

·       Specialist knowledge in technology, business strategy and operations to deliver a scalable solution supporting the CQC

·       Extensive specialist knowledge in a range of technical delivery, end user design and business strategy acquired through qualifications/professional accreditation or equivalent experience in technically specialist disciplines

·       Advanced theoretical and practical knowledge applied to architectural design to deliver business strategy by applying expert understanding across a range of technical disciplines, coding languages, layers in the architectural stack

·       Expert knowledge of loosely coupled, highly cohesive micro-services architecture and APIs

·       Expert knowledge of cloud solution architecture 

·       Specialist knowledge in a range of technologies including, by way of example:

o   Azure Platform

o   IDAM services (MS AD services)

o   SQL (Microsoft and Oracle)

o   Dynamics 365 & Sharepoint online SaaS packages

o   Kubernetes

o   Jenkins

o   JSON

o   Reuse of existing open source government developments e.g. Github repositories.

·       Experience in solution design and development with the Microsoft and/or Oracle technology stacks

·       Knowledge and understanding of latest trends in DevOps methodologies, processes, and tools

·       Expertise in developing with Agile SCRUM and Kanban methodologies and tools Trello, JIRA, SLACK etc.

·       Expert in continuous integration/development tools and approaches

·       Strong understanding of user-centred design and user-experience in an Agile software development lifecycle

·       Highly developed specialist knowledge and experience in applying strategic business, operational and design experience to inform architectural decisions; Evidence of experience in managing communications and governance to ensure delivery against architecture

·       Specialist knowledge of complex health related information systems based upon hospital information systems

·       Specialist experience in undertaking and leading complex technical analysis to deliver advanced solutions to leading edge technology enabled business change

·       Continued specialist technical development through formal learning and experience as an active member of the architectural community to evidence expert knowledge across a range of disciplines

·       Experience of bringing together multiple organisational units with sometimes opposing objectives to gain consensus through the rigorous application of analysis applied from a number of subject areas

·       Experience in the delivery of complex work, incorporating multiple inputs and stakeholders, management of fluctuating workflow and associated resource management

·       An excellent communicator, both in person and in writing, with the ability to present advice and information in a clear and logical way

·       Ability to articulate and present different points-of-view on various technologies

·       Excellent interpersonal skills to build rapport quickly and effectively manage the expectations of system users;

·       Strong problem-solving skills

·       An understanding of the background to and aims of current healthcare policy and appreciate the implications of this on engagement

·       Strong technical leadership and ability to provide direction to delivery team members and developers

·       Ability to present technical concepts, analysis and solutions to a wide technical as well as non-technical audience to insure broad adoption of the overall data architectural plan

·       Experience of transforming ways of working, both in terms of methods and culture

Desirable skills

·       Expertise of TOGAF as an architectural framework

·       Highly numerate with an analytics/informatics background

·       Knowledge of information governance standards and data management and security

What we can offer you…

Your health and wellbeing are important to us and are supported through generous annual leave (starting at 27 days and rising with service to 32.5 days, plus 8 Bank Holidays), a cycle to work scheme, discounted gym vouchers and access to a free employee assistance service 24 hours a day. We also understand the importance of financial health and offer membership of the NHS pension scheme, contributing about 14% of basic salary. You will also be able to access discounts to supermarkets, high street stores, electronics, fleet cars, plus we also have an internal reward scheme which could see you earn yourself a voucher or two! All of our Homeworkers are also kitted out with everything they need to comfortably work from home through the #HaveITYourWay campaign.

We want to support you to succeed and be your very best, with opportunities for training and development along with the support of experienced managers and mentors.  

We want to make working for CQC a great experience for everyone, and to role model a diverse and representative culture. To support an inclusive environment where colleagues feel empowered to bring their whole self to work, we support a variety of staff networks, including the Race Equality Network, LGBT+ Equality Network, Carers Equality Network, Disability Equality Network and Gender Equality network.

Job contact :

• Name : Recruitment
• Email : recruitment@cqc.org.uk

Recruitment team

• Email : recruitment@cqc.org.uk