Principal Security Architect (up to 95,278)

Who we are

At our heart, we are the department for realising potential. We enable children and learners to thrive, by protecting the vulnerable and ensuring the delivery of excellent standards of education, training and care.

Our Cyber Security department

The Department for Education is responsible for childrens services and education, including early years, schools, higher and further education policy, apprenticeships, and wider skills in England. We work to protect the departments essential services, like funding schools and colleges, and safeguarding children from cyber threats, ensuring the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of systems and data that underpin these essential citizen services.

We are responsible for the whole spectrum of cyber and information security services across the department, including Information Security, Security Operations, and Security Architecture and Engineering. We also lead on the departments cyber security offering to the education sector, developing strategies and leading on the development of services to increase cyber resilience throughout education and across our Arms-Length-Bodies.

This is a great opportunity if you want a challenge at a national level in a role that makes a difference to so many. Joining us means you will help to safeguard children and ensure their education and care is delivered effectively.

What youll do

As a Principal Security Architect (Grade 6), you will lead and shape security architecture across the department, including how security is designed into services at scale and influencing outcomes across government.

You will operate as a senior technical authority, providing expert judgment on the most complex, high‑risk architectural decisions, and coaching and developing other security architects and technical leaders across the organisation.

Leadership and accountability

You will be expected to:

• Provide shared functional leadership for security architecture within the department.
• Role‑model Civil Service behaviours at Grade 6 Level (Success Profiles: Civil Service behaviours - GOV.UK) particularly Leadership, Seeing the Big Picture, and Making Effective Decisions.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead and shape the security architecture vision and strategy across the department, working with peer principal architects and senior technology leaders in the department and across government.
• Provide authoritative decision‑making on the most complex and high‑risk architectural designs, balancing security, delivery, usability, and cost at organisational scale.
• Lead the development and governance of security architecture frameworks, standards, and patterns, ensuring they are coherent, pragmatic, and consistently applied across portfolios and programmes.
• Act as the senior escalation point for security architecture, resolving systemic issues that cannot be addressed within individual programmes or teams.
• Provide professional and capability leadership to security architects, mentoring senior practitioners, supporting capability development, and contributing to professional communities.
• Represent the department at senior and cross‑government forums, shaping policy, sharing best practice, and influencing the wider public sector cyber ecosystem.

Essential Criteria

• Expert level security architecture and system design: Strong expertise in designing and assuring secure systems at enterprise and ecosystem scale, applying modern security architecture principles and patterns to deliver secure, scalable outcomes across large, complex organisations.
• Security strategy, standards and governance leadership: Proven experience defining and setting enterprise security architecture strategy, establishing technical standards, and leading governance across multiple programmes, ensuring consistent adoption and compliance across delivery teams.
• Cloud and enterprise security expertise: Deep technical expertise in cloud security architecture (Azure and/or AWS), including securing enterprise-scale, multi-account or multi-subscription environments using native controls, secure configuration baselines, and policy-as-code approaches.
• Risk ownership, threat modelling and decision-making: Demonstrable expertise in threat modelling and risk assessment, with experience making and justifying organisation-wide, risk-based decisions, including advising senior risk owners and accepting accountability for residual risk in complex or sensitive environments.
• Senior leadership, communication and influence: Strong leadership and influencing skills, with the ability to operate credibly at senior and executive levels, translating complex security and architectural concepts into clear outcomes, and influencing decisions across multidisciplinary teams, stakeholders and external partners.
• Whole system thinking and strategic oversight: Proven ability to take a holistic, system-wide view of security, identifying systemic risks and shaping architectural direction across organisational and programme boundaries, beyond individual services or technical domains.

Desirable Criteria:

• Experience integrating security architecture into large‑scale Agile and DevSecOps delivery models.
• Experience applying security strategy consistently across federated or devolved technology estates.
• Experience leading or sponsoring professional communities or capability development activities.

Desirable criteria will only be assessed at interview, in the event of a tie break situation, to make an informed decision.