Lead Solution Architect (IT)

Secure Innovation is part of CGI's Space, Defence and Intelligence business unit, focused primarily on the delivery of contemporary and innovative technical solutions for the government agencies most challenging problems. Our teams work alongside our clients to help them understand how to exploit technologies to maintain competitive advantage. Our systems are engineered for performance, security, reliability and scalability; built with modern CI and CD tooling and techniques. We are currently looking for an experienced Solution Architect to join our team ? being able to think outside of the box to overcome technical challenges is essential! Candidate profile: The role offers fantastic opportunities to work on leading edge and bespoke technologies within an interesting and highly rewarding environment. We are heavily committed to developing our members and provide excellent learning and development opportunities to ensure that your knowledge and skills keep pace with the evolving technology landscape. We engender a culture of innovation, collaboration and ownership; highly motivated self starters thrive within our organisation. Although we would like candidates to have all of the skills we need, we would consider high quality individuals who meet most of the criteria. The Lead Solution Architect is the senior technical authority for the DE Service, accountable for defining and delivering its architectural vision, technology strategy and security posture. The role translates business objectives and priorities into scalable, secure and cost effective technical capabilities, ensuring robust governance, compliance and assurance throughout. Operating at a strategic level, they provide clear architectural direction, oversee the evolution of the technology stack and roadmap, manage technical risk and debt, and represent the Service confidently across client, security and supplier forums while enabling high performing, secure by design delivery teams. Required qualifications to be successful in this role

1. Leadership & Team Enablement. Provide visible and accessible technical leadership, mentoring teams in high quality, secure by design architecture. Establish and enforce architectural principles and standards while fostering accountability, clarity and technical excellence. Guide engineering teams in the effective use of Python based delivery practices, modular service design and secure development patterns that support the Service's transition towards a more microservice oriented architecture.
2. Service Vision & Scalable Architecture. Own the long term vision for how the DE Service evolves and scales, ensuring security, automation, scalability, resilience and performance are embedded as core non functional foundations. Define architectural principles that enable elastic growth, operational efficiency and automation first delivery, reducing manual overhead and cost to serve. Ensure today's design decisions deliberately support future expansion while controlling technical debt, risk and total cost of ownership. Finally, champion future capability growth of AI and ML enhancements to our products and services
3. Strategic Architecture Leadership. Own the end to end DE Service architecture strategy, translating business objectives into a governed technology roadmap defining capability evolution, migration pathways, lifecycle management and TRL progression. Lead architectural governance across the Service, maintaining clear decision frameworks and Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) to ensure traceable, auditable and strategically aligned design choices. Ensure architectural decisions enable scalable, resilient, high performing and secure by design service delivery. high performing, secure by design, service orientated and microservice aligned architecture.
4. Technology Stack Ownership & Evolution. Own the end to end DE Service technology stack, defining what technologies are adopted, why they are selected and how they evolve over time. Ensure the stack supports the core product's data workflow of Normalise ? Ingest ? Enrich ? Visualise, with clear technology choices, patterns and integration points for each stage. Maintain ownership of the primarily Python based technology baseline while governing the controlled introduction of microservices, AI/ML components and supporting platform capabilities. Establish clear principles for standardisation, interoperability and security, ensuring the stack supports scalability, automation and cost efficiency. Govern the technology roadmap, managing lifecycle, obsolescence, technical debt and the controlled introduction of new capabilities in line with business need and risk appetite.
5. Security Leadership & Governance. Act as Security Lead for the DE Service, defining and governing the security architecture in alignment with policy and accreditation requirements. Represent the Service at security forums, contribute to key risk registers and embed a strong, proactive security culture across the teams. Ensure security controls are consistently applied across the full data workflow, including data normalisation, ingestion, enrichment, visualisation and any AI/ML enabled processing, with appropriate consideration of data handling, model governance, access control and deployment packaging.
6. Technical Risk, Debt & Performance Oversight. Maintain oversight of technical debt and architectural and security risk, ensuring remediation is prioritised in line with business impact. Define and enforce NFRs, oversee system performance and balance innovation with operational stability through structured governance. Manage the risks associated with architectural transition, Python dependency management, AI/ML adoption, service interoperability and the need to package and deploy only the capabilities required for a given client or operational context.
7. Innovation & Capability Maturation. Drive the structured maturation of innovative technologies into operational capability, assessing TRL and readiness for deployment. Ensure new capabilities are integrated in a secure, supportable and controlled manner aligned to roadmap priorities. Lead the assessment and controlled adoption of new capabilities, specifically AI and machine learning capabilities to enhance the Service. Ensuring they are explainable, supportable, secure and aligned to user need rather than introduced as isolated technology experiments.
8. Systems Thinking & Cross Domain Integration. Apply systems thinking to ensure coherent end to end architecture, managing interdependencies and cross domain impacts. Ensure the service remains modular and configurable, allowing capabilities to be packaged, deployed and enabled selectively depending on client, security, operational or environment specific requirements. Maintain coherence across Python services, emerging microservice components, data pipelines, AI/ML capabilities and visualisation layers.
9. Client & Stakeholder Engagement. Act as the senior technical representative for the Service, delivering clear and authoritative client presentations and governance briefings. Build trusted relationships with stakeholders.