Enterprise Architect Ref. 3658

Job Description

Salary: £71,889 to £80,079 comprising a basic salary of £68,745 and a concessionary payment of £3,144. The exact salary offered within this range will depend on your skills and experience. An additional Skills Payment is available once your skills level is confirmed, £3,822 for Level 1 or £8,190 for Level 2. Once in role, there may also be opportunities to qualify for further allowances and additional skills-related payments.

Flexible working: we recognise the importance of a healthy work-life balance and offer a range of working patterns, including full-time, part-time, and compressed hours. Home/hybrid working may be possible depending on business needs, but it is limited due to the nature of our work. We also support flexible start and finish times to help you manage your personal and professional commitments.

About us
GCHQ is an intelligence, cyber and security agency with a mission to keep the UK safe. We use cutting-edge technology, ingenuity and partnerships to identify, analyse and disrupt threats. Working with our intelligence partners, we protect the UK from terrorism, cyber-attacks and espionage. At GCHQ, you’ll do varied and fascinating work in a supportive and inclusive environment that puts the emphasis on teamwork.

The role
As an Enterprise Architect, you’ll lead and support other Architects in shaping, and embedding GCHQs enterprise architecture. With responsibility for a defined remit of one or more departments, you’ll work across teams to design and guide architectures, influence decision-making and manage risk. You’ll be a trusted advisor, communicating complex architectural topics to a wide range of stakeholders. And as you work on our cutting-edge, unique technology, you’ll have the opportunity to apply your skills to interesting challenges and grow your career in a purposeful way.

Working on a complex portfolio of solutions, you’ll design and maintain artifacts for programmes and services within your departments, balancing organisational priorities and practical delivery. You’ll work with senior colleagues to ensure alignment with our long-term strategic goals, user needs, and industry best practice. Once you’re established in the role, you’ll also take on line management responsibilities for a small team, using your experience to support them with their work and careers.

You’ll collaborate with delivery teams, engineers and business colleagues, and work extensively with senior leaders, external partners and industry bodies to shape shared direction and manage dependencies. Please note that occasional travel to sites across the UK will be
required to enable close working with colleagues from across the organisation.

About you
You’ll have practical experience working as an Enterprise Architect, including leading teams or line-managing others. We’re interested in your support for our shared mission, the practical experience you’ve gained in the field and how you’ve contributed to architectural work across technology, data, digital or business-change initiatives. You will be required to provide mentoring to less-senior colleagues. In addition, you’ll be confident in your understanding of architecture standard and frameworks (such as ArchiMate TOGAF, Zachman and MODAF), as well as principles and governance models.

You will bring expertise in translating organisational goals into actionable architectural strategies. You’ll have experience leading design initiatives, proactively identifying risks and constraints, and optimising environments across technology, data, and processes to deliver impactful solutions. This means you’ll be well-equipped with the skills needed to take on complex, high-level projects that require trade-offs, strategic decision-making, and active management of organisational impact.

Your communication skills will be key as you work with senior stakeholders from technical and non-technical backgrounds, explaining decisions and technical concepts in a way that suits different audiences. You’ll be collaborative and adept at influencing and negotiating, and comfortable working across different teams. As your priorities will shift depending on business needs, you’ll also need to be adaptable and able to manage your own time effectively

Training and development
We’re proud to offer an inclusive and supportive working environment, and as an organisation that values and nurtures our colleagues, both professionally and personally, we’re dedicated to helping you fulfil your potential.

When you join, you’ll receive a full induction into GCHQ so you can learn more about who we are, what we do, and where your role fits in. Once you’re in post, you’ll receive formal and on-the-job training, along with all the support you need to thrive. We encourage continuous professional development and are committed to giving you the space and capacity to develop, innovate, and experiment. Typically, we expect 20% of your time to be dedicated to developing yourself and supporting others.

We value your ability to learn and adapt to new challenges, so we’ll invest in your skills and in the way you prefer to learn, from books, study, courses, and conferences to stretching work supported by your team. You’ll be encouraged to drive and shape your own personal development, and you’ll have access to learning and development opportunities tailored to your role. We’ll cover the cost and provide the time and support you need to gain professional qualifications and certifications.

From day one, you’ll have access to mentors and subject matter experts. We’ll help you create a structured development and career plan that’s right for you.

Rewards and benefits
You’ll receive a starting salary of £71,889 to £80,079, plus other benefits including:

• 25 days’ annual leave automatically rising to 30 days after 5 years' service, and an additional 10.5 days of public and privilege holidays
• opportunities to be recognised through our employee performance scheme
• an interest-free season ticket loan (travel and parking)
• an excellent pension scheme
• a cycle to work scheme
• facilities such as a gym, restaurant, and on-site coffee bars (at some locations)
• paid parental and adoption leave

Equal opportunities
At GCHQ diversity and inclusion are critical to our mission. To protect the UK, we need a truly diverse workforce that reflects the society we serve. This includes diversity in every sense of the word: those with different backgrounds, ages, ethnicities, gender identities, sexual orientations, ways of thinking and those with disabilities or neurodivergent conditions. We therefore welcome and encourage applications from everyone, including those from groups that are under-represented in our workforce such as women, those from an ethnic minority background, people with disabilities and those from low socio-economic backgrounds.

Find out more about our culture, working environment and diversity on our website here.

We’re Disability Confident
GCHQ is proud to have achieved Leader status within the Department for Work and Pensions’ Disability Confident scheme. This is aimed at encouraging employers to think differently about disability and take action to improve how they recruit, retain and develop disabled people. Being Disability Confident, we aim to offer a fair and proportionate number of person-to-person interviews to any candidate who self-identifies as disabled and meets the essential criteria for the role. This is our ‘Offer of Interview’ (OOI). To secure an interview for this vacancy, the essential criteria (in order of application process) are:

• experience leading and guiding architecture design by translating organisational strategy and business and user needs into architectures and artifacts that are adopted across teams, and align with enterprise standards (assessed at application sift)
• experience making and guiding architectural decisions involving managed levels of risk and complexity, balancing trade-offs (for example, cost, risk scalability or maintainability) and using governance and standards to enable sustainable delivery (assessed at application sift)
• ability to influence and align multiple teams and senior stakeholders by communicating complex architectural concepts and building agreement around shared architectural direction (assessed at application sift)

There is a wide range of extra support available throughout the recruitment process to enable you to do your best, see our website for information on reasonable adjustments we can offer.

What to expect
Our recruitment process is fair, transparent, and based on merit. Here is a brief overview of each stage, in order:

1. application sift
2. virtual interview (assessing your technical skills and the organisational competencies)
3. if successful, you’ll receive a conditional offer of employment

Please note, you must successfully pass each stage of the process to progress to the next. Your application may take around 6 to 9 months to process including vetting, so we advise you continue any current employment until you have received your final job offer.

Before you apply
To work at GCHQ, you must be a British citizen or hold dual British nationality. Read the full eligibility criteria.

This role requires the highest level of security clearance, known as Developed Vetting (DV). It’s something everyone in the UK Intelligence Community undertakes. Find out more about the vetting process.

Please note we have a strict drugs policy. Once you start your application, you must not take any recreational drugs, and you’ll need to declare any previous drug usage at the relevant stage.

Before you apply, we advise you to consider setting up a separate email address for your contact with us, to ensure your personal and application correspondence remain separate. Try to avoid having identifying features in your email address, such as your first and/or surname and date of birth. This is good practice and will help you manage your application with us more securely.

The role is based in Cheltenham so you’ll need to live within a commutable distance. Please consider any financial implications and practicalities before submitting an application, as we do not offer relocation costs.

We offer reasonable reimbursement of travel costs for candidates attending in-person appointments during the recruitment and vetting process. Full details will be provided with your interview or assessment invitation.

Reimbursement is discretionary and will only be made in line with the Candidate Expenses Policy, as amended from time to time. Candidates must book their own travel, using the most economical option, and provide original hardcopy receipts for reimbursement.

Please note, you should only launch your application from within the UK. If you are based overseas, you should wait until you visit the UK to launch an application. Applying from outside the UK will impact on our ability to progress your application. You should not discuss your application, other than with your partner or a close family member.

Right to withdraw statement:
Please be aware that we reserve the right to bring forward the closing date for this role from the original closing date once a certain number of applications have been received. Please be mindful of this and submit your application at your earliest convenience to avoid disappointment.