Senior Technical Architect

Is it time you unlocked your potential?

Student Loans Company is a non-profit making Government-owned organisation to provide loans and grants to students in universities and colleges in the UK. Since 1989, we have enabled our customers to invest in their futures by delivering secure, accurate and efficient assessment, payment and repayment services.

Our Values

Culture is at the heart of everything we do at SLC and we are guided by our five values which help make SLC a great place to work:

• Honesty: We act with integrity and transparency, sharing information openly and addressing challenges with courage.

• Empowerment: We enable people to take initiative, make impactful decisions, and continuously learn and grow.

• Accountability: We deliver on commitments, own our successes and mistakes, and strive for quality outcomes.

• Respect: We value diverse perspectives, actively listen, and create an inclusive environment where everyone belongs.

• Trust: We collaborate across teams, build dependable relationships, and work as one to deliver for our customers.

These values are more than wordsthey guide our decisions, shape our collaborations, and strengthen our impact on the students we serve.

About the Role

As a Senior Technical Architect within SLCs Architecture team, youll help shape and govern the organisations technical direction. Youll define and refine architectures and designs that support major change programmes, ensuring they align with SLCs principles, strategies, and enterprise roadmap. This includes working across a diverse application estate from Commercial Off the Shelf Solutions through to micro service-based platforms both on prem and on cloud.

You will also contribute to the development of technical roadmaps, lead design assurance activities, and promote innovation by exploring new technologies and approaches. Collaboration is central to the roleyoull work closely with business and technical colleagues, communicate architectural designs to varied audiences, and support technical teams in their development.

What You Bring:

• Ability to make architecture decisions while solving high risk architecture issues, assuring services against broader government standards, and managing architectural risks

• Confident translating complex technical concepts into non-technical language for senior stakeholders and presenting at various forums

• Ability to work collaboratively in a group or team and actively network with others while using your initiative to identify problems or issues in the team dynamic and rectify them

• Capacity to advocate or influence innovation initiatives and gain buy-in through collaboration with engineering, product and business teams

• Evidence-based decision-making skills e.g. translation of PoC findings into actionable recommendations. Providing risk assessment and mitigation

• Ability to assess maturity, risk, interoperability and sustainability of technologies while understanding and communicating complexity and architecture fit

• A self‑starting approach with the ability to work autonomously and collaboratively

• Advanced proficiency in conceptual, logical, physical and semantic data modelling for operational and analytical systems

• Experience in design and delivery of data pipelines using enterprise integration patterns and tooling from on-prem and cloud data sources to enterprise data warehouse and data lakehouse architecture

• Experience working with software delivery partners in a multi-vendor environment, including pre-contract engagement, preparation of invitations to tender and tender evaluation

• Experience and knowledge of design & delivery of data services from at least one of public cloud providers e.g. AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud

• Experience of architecture design assurance and presentation at technical assurance board and architecture review board for information and approval