Enterprise Architect

Location: London or Newcastle with a minimum of 2 days per week in the office in line with our hybrid working policy.

Salary: Newcastle – c£61,250; London – c£70,000 (more may be available for exceptional candidates).

About the role

The National Audit Office (NAO) is the UK’s main public sector audit body. Independent of government, we audit the accounts of various public sector bodies, examine the propriety of government spending, assess risks to financial control and accountability, and review the economy, efficiency and effectiveness of programmes, projects, and activities.

The NAO’s Digital Services (DS) function is seeking an Enterprise Architect responsible for bridging the gap between our business strategy and technology execution. This pivotal role involves overseeing the organisation's technology landscape, ensuring that systems, data, and processes align seamlessly to support the NAO's overarching goals. The Enterprise Architect will be instrumental in mapping the current tech stack, reducing technical complexity, and establishing robust architecture governance.

Crucially, this role will support the Data and AI team by providing the enterprise architecture standards, patterns, and integration guidance needed to help deliver the data strategy. The postholder will work collaboratively with Data and AI leadership, taking strategic direction on domain-specific requirements while ensuring the wider technology landscape remains coherent, secure, scalable, and aligned to organisational priorities.

Responsibilities

• Align overarching technology strategy with the NAO’s business goals and objectives.
• Develop and maintain the architectural roadmap, mapping the transition from current state to future state.
• Audit existing technology stacks to reduce complexity, identify redundancies, and consolidate tools where appropriate.
• Establish, mature, and govern the rules, frameworks, standards, processes, and practices for how technology is acquired, designed, built, reviewed, and deployed across the organisation, including through wider Architecture Review Board and Design Authority activities.
• Partner closely with the Data & AI team to operationalise the data strategy, taking their lead on domain-specific requirements to provide supportive enterprise-level architecture.
• Continuously scan the horizon for emerging technologies (e.g., advanced cloud capabilities) to assess their value for the organisation.
• Develop and maintain comprehensive enterprise architecture models, diagrams, and target-state designs.
• Align technology investments with business strategy to ensure value delivery and operational efficiency.
• Establish and apply architectural standards, governance frameworks, and best practices across technology domains.
• Evaluate emerging technologies to determine their potential value and applicability to the NAO’s objectives.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams—including solution architects, developers, security, and business stakeholders—to ensure cohesive enterprise solutions that meet organisational needs.
• Take an active role in wider Architecture Review Board and Design Authority activities, providing architectural governance, assurance, challenge, and oversight across programmes and change initiatives.
• Mature the NAO’s enterprise architecture processes, practices, artefacts, and engagement model so that architectural guidance is practical, proportionate, repeatable, and embedded in delivery ways of working.
• Work with the Data Architect to produce and publish an enterprise data architecture blueprint that aligns data management, integration, governance, and platform choices with the NAO’s wider enterprise architecture standards.
• Support the Data and AI team to align the data strategy with the broader business and technology strategy, ensuring that data architecture decisions are consistent with enterprise standards, security expectations, and delivery priorities.
• Work with the Data Architect to design and configure the central data management repository, ensuring it supports architecture documentation, data governance, lineage, ownership, and reuse across the organisation.

Requirements

• Proven experience working as an Enterprise Architect or Lead Solution Architect in a complex organisational environment.
• Demonstrated experience in designing and implementing enterprise-wide technology strategies, cloud adoption (e.g., Azure), and governance frameworks.
• Demonstrated experience auditing technology landscapes, consolidating systems, and successfully reducing technical debt.
• Experience working collaboratively with specialised teams, with a track record of enabling and supporting specific domain strategies rather than dictating technical direction.
• Demonstrated experience communicating complex technical concepts to executive leadership and non-technical stakeholders.

Skills

The following skill sets are required at the specified levels (reference):

• Architect for the whole context (Expert): Assess how trends in society and industry practices might impact the organisation; work with people outside of your organisation to inform policies, strategies and standards; anticipate changes to policy and build resilience through your architectural work; coach others in identifying important trends.
• Architecture communication (Expert): Communicate with technical and non-technical stakeholders at all levels, and across organisations, using architecture communication techniques; mediate between people in difficult architectural discussions; gain support from business and technical stakeholders for architectural initiatives with high levels of risk, impact and complexity; coach and support others in architecture communication.
• Commercial perspective (Practitioner): Identify appropriate contractual frameworks and approaches; identify, evaluate and select appropriate suppliers.
• Community collaboration (Practitioner): Work collaboratively in a group, actively networking with others; adapt feedback to ensure its effective and lasting; use your initiative to identify problems or issues in the team dynamic and rectify them; identify issues through Agile ‘health checks’ with the team, and help to stimulate the right responses.
• Enterprise architecture (Practitioner): Design an architecture that defines the technology, people, process and other elements needed to achieve organisation objectives; work with others across the organisation to ensure your design is used to achieve the organisation’s objectives.
• Making architectural decisions (Practitioner): Make and guide architectural design decisions characterised by medium risk and complexity; identify and address architectural risks that affect multiple teams or domains; use architectural governance and assurance to make design decisions and manage technical risks at the appropriate level; contribute to the development of architectural governance and assurance.
• Problem definition and shaping (Expert): Lead the framing of a problem characterised by high complexity, complication, or risk so that a solution can be created; coach others in defining problems and describing appropriate options for solutions; help others challenge requirements and assumptions, and identify opportunities when defining problems and solution options.
• Strategy design (Expert): Define and connect strategies or visions across the organisation or wider government; enable the implementation of strategies or visions across the organisation or wider government, for example, by advocating for resources and removing blockers.

This role reports into the Head of Audit Technology.