Technical Architect Engineering Lead- London

FDM is a global business and technology consultancy seeking a Technical Architect and Engineering Lead with Active SC to work for our client within the Public sector. This is initially a 3 month contract with the potential to extend and will be a Hybrid role that will be based in London.

Our client is seeking an experienced Technical Architect and Engineering Lead to set the technical direction and lead hands on engineering for a referral capability discovery and technical proof of concept. The project will test how staff and authorised systems can create referrals, keep the relevant business context, notify recipients and track responses across a business support ecosystem. You will turn discovery findings into a proportionate architecture, guide two senior engineers and work with client specialists to set up a maintainable route to deployment and handover. The outcome will be a working demonstrator and supporting evidence to inform a decision on moving to alpha.

Responsibilities

• Lead technical discovery with service, CRM, platform, data and security stakeholders, assessing reuse of existing applications and confirming integration contracts, access and dependencies.
• Produce and maintain C4 context and container views, deployment views where useful, architecture decisions, data flows and the technical options assessment.
• Define logical boundaries for the interface, referral logic, persistence, notifications and integrations without prescribing unnecessary services or repositories.
• Agree the referral lifecycle, data model and OpenAPI contracts, including source identity, authorisation, idempotency, status semantics and error handling.
• Lead threat modelling and proportionate assurance, agreeing staff SSO and a secure recipient response pattern that addresses forwarded links and unauthorised updates.
• Guide implementation in Python/Django, contribute code to critical paths, review pull requests, mentor engineers and coordinate testing and technical delivery risks.
• Work with platform owners on GitHub Actions, environment configuration and deployment through supported abstractions, agreeing responsibilities for any infrastructure changes.
• Present feasibility evidence, limitations and options for alpha, and deliver a prioritised technical backlog and an effective handover to support teams.

• Active SC
• Experience leading architecture and hands on engineering for web applications and API integrations in a multidisciplinary delivery team.
• Strong current Python/Django capability, with the judgement to reuse established patterns and explain technical trade offs to non technical stakeholders.
• Experience designing REST/JSON APIs, OpenAPI contracts, relational data models and PostgreSQL persistence.
• Practical knowledge of authentication, authorisation, SSO, threat modelling, data minimisation and secure integration patterns.
• Experience establishing automated tests, peer review, GitHub Actions delivery pipelines and useful application observability.
• Ability to lead a time boxed discovery or proof of concept, expose assumptions and distinguish demonstrated feasibility from production readiness.
• Desirable: delivery within UK government or another assured public sector environment, familiarity with CRM estates, GOV.UK Notify and company data integrations, and experience with Node.js, React or FastAPI.
• Minimum of 10 years' experience in technical architecture and engineering leadership.