Solution Architect - Customer-Facing Products (Public Sector)

About the Role
The Engineering Lead provides technical leadership for customer-facing digital products, with emphasis on frontend architecture, mobile responsiveness, accessibility, performance, reliability, observability, and secure integration with backend and platform services.

• Define frontend and service architecture patterns for customer-facing products.
• Ensure responsive, accessible, performant, secure, and maintainable user interfaces.
• Guide engineering practices for web, mobile, API consumption, caching, authentication, and monitoring.
• Review technical designs for scalability, usability, maintainability, browser compatibility, and production readiness.
• Mentor engineers on quality engineering, frontend performance, reusable components, and integration patterns.
• Work with Product Managers, Designers, Security, Operations, and platform teams to deliver reliable customer experiences.

Preferred Skills

• Strong full-stack engineering experience across modern frontend frameworks such as React or equivalent, backend services, APIs, and enterprise integration patterns.
• Ability to define scalable frontend and backend architecture, reusable components, service patterns, design systems, and integration approaches for customer-facing digital services.
• Good understanding of responsive design, mobile-first development, cross-browser compatibility, accessibility standards, and inclusive user experience.
• Experience designing secure, scalable, and maintainable APIs, authentication and authorisation flows, data exchange patterns, and integrations with enterprise platforms.
• Good knowledge of relational and non-relational databases, data modelling, query optimisation, transaction handling, and data integrity considerations.
• Familiarity with cloud-native development, containerisation, serverless services, infrastructure integration, CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, code quality gates, and release readiness.
• Ability to design for performance, reliability, resilience, observability, logging, monitoring, error handling, caching, retries, rate limiting, and graceful degradation in production systems.
• Working knowledge of secure engineering practices, including secure coding, input validation, secrets management, privacy-by-design, vulnerability management, and secure configuration.
• Ability to assess technical debt, propose pragmatic remediation plans, and balance delivery speed with long-term maintainability and operational sustainability.
• Experience in Agile product delivery, backlog refinement, technical estimation, sprint planning, and iterative delivery of customer-facing features.
• Strong ownership mindset with the ability to drive technical outcomes across ambiguity, dependencies, resource constraints, and changing priorities.
• Ability to mentor, coach, and uplift engineers through design reviews, code reviews, engineering standards, technical guidance, and constructive feedback.
• Strong collaboration and stakeholder management skills to align Product Managers, UX Designers, Security, Operations, vendors, and platform teams around delivery outcomes.
• Clear and structured communication skills to explain technical trade-offs, risks, dependencies, options, and recommendations to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Pragmatic problem-solving and decision-making skills, with the ability to balance user needs, delivery timelines, engineering quality, security, and business outcomes.