Lead Enterprise Architect
| Posting date: | 20 February 2026 |
|---|---|
| Salary: | £57,515 to £82,430 per year |
| Additional salary information: | The base pay is £57,515. In addition to this, the role includes a Digital and Data allowance of up to £24,915. |
| Hours: | Full time |
| Closing date: | 08 March 2026 |
| Location: | Swansea |
| Company: | Government Recruitment Service |
| Job type: | Permanent |
| Job reference: | 449817/1 |
Summary
Do you have deep experience in business and enterprise architecture, with the credibility to advise senior leaders, align complex stakeholder groups and guide large scale transformation across an organisation?
If you thrive on working in complex environments, balancing strategic intent with practical delivery, and leading architectural thinking that helps organisations change with confidence, we would love to hear from you!
Joining our department comes with many benefits, including:
- Employer pension contribution of 28.97% of your salary. Read more about Civil Service Pensions here
- 25 days annual leave, increasing by 1 day each year of service (up to a maximum of 30 days annual leave), plus 8 bank holidays a privilege day for the King’s birthday
- Flexible working options where we encourage a great work-life balance.
Read more in the Benefits section below!
Find out more about what it's like working at Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency - Department for Transport Careers
We are seeking an experienced Lead Enterprise Architect to join our Architecture function. This role will play a pivotal part in shaping the strategic direction and maturity of business and enterprise architecture across the agency, ensuring that architectural practice effectively supports business strategy, transformation and capability delivery.
As Lead Enterprise Architect you will act as a senior advisor and leader, influencing strategic decision making, guiding architectural practice and supporting cross-functional teams to deliver value. You will work closely with business stakeholders and technical teams to develop and maintain integrated architecture artefacts, business capability models and roadmaps that articulate both current and future state views of the agency’s operations. Your focus will include business architecture, data, information flows and governance, alongside technology and solution architecture.
This is a senior role requiring strong leadership, excellent stakeholder engagement skills and an ability to operate effectively across business, policy and technical communities within the agency.
Strategic Architecture and Leadership
- Lead the definition and delivery of enterprise architecture strategy, ensuring alignment with organisational goals and priorities.
- Provide high-level architectural guidance that interprets business strategy into coherent architecture roadmaps and business capability models.
- Horizon scan for trends, risks and opportunities that could influence future architectural decisions and organisational capability.
- Promote architectural standards, principles, patterns and frameworks across the agency.
Business Architecture Focus
- Develop and maintain business architecture artefacts that represent the agency’s capability landscape, business processes, information needs and organisational interdependencies.
- Work with business and policy leads to articulate, analyse and optimise business capabilities in support of policy outcomes and transformation initiatives.
- Use business capability insights to influence strategic planning, investment decisions and prioritisation of change activity.
Stakeholder Engagement and Communication
- Cultivate and maintain strong relationships with senior stakeholders across business, digital, data and technology domains.
- Communicate complex architectural concepts clearly to technical and non-technical audiences, ensuring common understanding.
- Facilitate discussions to align stakeholders around architectural direction and trade-offs.
Team Leadership and Collaboration
- Lead, mentor and support other enterprise architects and architectural practitioners to foster architectural excellence.
- Support enterprise-wide architectural governance, assurance and decision-making processes.
- Work collaboratively with delivery teams to integrate architectural thinking into planning, development and implementation activities.
Risk and Assurance
- Identify and assess architectural risk, advising on mitigation strategies that balance agility, value and operational resilience.
- Ensure integration of security, data protection, compliance and risk considerations into architectural work.
Your responsibilities will include but aren't limited to:
- Network and communicate with senior stakeholders across enterprises and seek opportunities for improvement.
- Support at least one community or team, or a combination of both.
- Find and use best practice and emerging technologies and approaches
- Lead teams including enterprise architects and help them understand how to deliver the team’s objectives to meet organisational goals.
- Horizon scan for influences or risks.
- Support successful delivery of the long-term strategy.
- Take a leading role in the overall direction of business and digital capabilities.
Great line management is important to us as an organisation, and we will equip and support line managers to develop the skills they need. We aim to empower line managers to create teams where people can flourish and deliver excellent outcomes for the public.
For further information on the role, please read the attached role profile. Please note that the role profile is for information purposes only - whilst all elements are relevant to the role, they may not all be assessed during the recruitment process. This job advert will detail exactly what will be assessed during the recruitment process.
Open Sessions: Would you like to find out more about the role, the team and what it’s like to work in our department? If so, we are organising an open session where you can virtually 'meet the team' on Tuesday 3rd March 2026 at 12:00pm. Sign up here.
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