Associate Solutions Architect

Department Technology Roles
Location(s) Cheltenham

Job description 

Salary: £53,496 to £61,686, comprising a basic salary of £50,838 and a concessionary payment of £2,658. The exact salary offered within this range will depend on your skills and experience. An additional Skills Payment is available once your skills level is confirmed, £3,822 for Level 1 or £8,190 for Level 2.

Flexible working: We recognise the importance of a healthy work-life balance and offer a range of working patterns, including full-time, part-time, and compressed hours. While most of our work is carried out on-site due to its sensitive nature, occasional home working may be possible depending on business requirements. We also support flexible start and finish times to help you balance your personal and professional commitments.

About us

GCHQ is an intelligence, cyber and security agency with a mission to keep the UK safe. We use cutting-edge technology, ingenuity and partnerships to identify, analyse and disrupt threats. Working with our intelligence partners, MI5 and MI6, we protect the UK from terrorism, cyber-attacks and espionage. At GCHQ, you’ll do varied and fascinating work in a supportive and inclusive environment that puts the emphasis on teamwork.

The role

As one of our Associate Solutions Architects, you’ll help design and deliver technology solutions across GCHQ. Our work is unique, often cutting-edge, and designed to support our highly specialised national security mission. As a result, you’ll have exceptional opportunities for training, development and continuous learning within an environment unlike that of any other organisation. This means the opportunity for learning and support in this role is extensive, with plenty of interesting challenges and dedicated support on offer.

Guided by one of our experienced Solutions Architects, you’ll help shape designs, produce architectural artefacts, and be part of the teams that deliver the solutions. It’s an excellent opportunity to step into solutions architecture from a background such as software, infrastructure or systems engineering, or to build on your existing architecture experience and grow your career.

In this role, you’ll create solution designs, documentation and models that align with our architectural standards end to end and strategic direction. Experience with at least one modern framework will help you work effectively within our structured ways of working and collaborate with delivery teams, engineers and business colleagues. You’ll play a key role in ensuring our solutions remain robust, scalable and cost-effective. 

A big part of the job is understanding business needs and helping to define solutions that take technical constraints, delivery plans, risks and complexity into account. With support from your line manager and mentor, you’ll answer questions, clarify designs, and adapt solutions as requirements change. Each day brings opportunities to gain practical experience across the lifecycle of our capabilities, learn from experienced architects and build confidence.

Occasional travel to sites across the UK will be required so you can work closely with colleagues across the organisation.

About you

You don’t need a degree or any specific qualifications to apply for this role; we’re interested in your experience and your motivation to support our shared mission. A foundational understanding of solution architecture is important, along with experience contributing to the design and delivery of digital or technology solutions. Experience with at least one modern framework, such as TOGAF, NIST and ITIL, is also valuable, typically gained in roles like software engineering, infrastructure engineering, DevOps.

As you’ll be involved in projects from day one, an understanding of how business needs, technology choices and delivery constraints shape solution design will be required. You’ll operate independently on moderately complex problems while contributing to broader work led by more senior architects, responsible for delivering architectural design and direction for a specific solution or defined area of delivery. Effective communication skills, combined with a broad technical foundation, will help you to explain design decisions to both technical and non-technical audiences.

Being collaborative, comfortable working across teams and confident in influencing and negotiation, will help in finding solutions that work for everyone. Because priorities may change depending on business needs, you’ll need to be adaptable and able to manage your own time. And your ability to think critically and solve problems creatively means you’ll be able to find holistic solutions to uniquely challenging requirements.

Training and development

We’re proud to offer an inclusive and supportive working environment, and as an organisation that values and nurtures our colleagues, both professionally and personally, we’re dedicated to helping you fulfil your potential.

On joining, you’ll have a full induction into GCHQ, so you can learn more about who we are, what we do, and where your role fits in. Once in your role, you’ll receive formal and on-the-job training and all the support you need to thrive at work. We encourage continuous professional development and are dedicated to allowing you the space and capacity to develop, innovate and experiment. We typically expect 20% of your time to be spent on developing yourself and supporting others.

We value your ability to learn and adapt to new challenges, so we’ll invest in your skills and the way you like to learn, from books, study, courses, and conferences to stretching work with the support of the team. You’ll be encouraged to drive and shape your own personal development, and you’ll have access to learning and development opportunities tailored to your role. We’ll cover the cost and provide you with the time and support to gain professional qualifications and certifications. 

From day one, you’ll have access to mentors and subject matter experts. We’ll help you create a structured development and career plan that’s right for you

Rewards and benefits

You’ll receive a starting salary of £53,496 to £61,686, plus other benefits including:

• 25 days’ annual leave, rising automatically to 30 days after 5 years' service, plus an additional 10.5 days of public and privilege holidays
• opportunities to be recognised through our employee performance scheme
• an interest-free season ticket loan
• an excellent pension scheme
• a cycle to work scheme
• facilities such as a gym, restaurant, and on-site coffee bars (at some locations)
• paid parental and adoption leave

Equal opportunities

At GCHQ, diversity and inclusion are critical to our mission. To protect the UK, we need a workforce that truly reflects the society we serve. This includes diversity in every sense of the word: people of different backgrounds, ages, ethnicities, gender identities, sexual orientations, ways of thinking and those with disabilities or neurodivergent conditions. We therefore welcome and encourage applications from everyone, including individuals from groups that are currently under-represented in our workforce, such as women, people from ethnic minority backgrounds, people with disabilities and those from low socio-economic backgrounds.

We’re Disability Confident

GCHQ is proud to have achieved Leader status within the Department for Work and Pensions’ Disability Confident scheme. The scheme encourages employers to think differently about disability and take action to improve how they recruit, retain and develop disabled people. As a Disability Confident organisation, we aim to ensure that a fair and proportionate number of disabled applicants who best meet the essential criteria for this position, assessed at sift, are offered an interview, if it practical for us to do so. This is known as the Offer of Interview. To secure an interview for this role, the minimum criteria (in order of application process) are:

• experience interpreting business and user needs, and translating them into maintainable architecture designs and artefacts that align with solutions architecture strategy and standards
• experience supporting architectural decision-making by gathering information, analysing options, and understanding risks and trade-offs (for example, delivery, impact, or technical complexity), while working within governance and standards
• ability to work with technical and non-technical stakeholders within and across teams, communicating architectural concepts clearly and contributing to discussions that support alignment to agreed solutions

What to expect

Our recruitment process is fair, transparent, and based on merit. Here is a brief overview of each stage, in order:

• Application sift.
• Virtual interview, assessing your technical skills and the organisational competencies.
• If successful, you’ll receive a Conditional Offer of Employment.

Please note, you must successfully pass each stage of the process to progress to the next. Your application may take around 6 to 9 months to process including vetting, so we advise that you continue any current employment until you have received your final job offer.

Before you apply

To work at GCHQ, you must be a British citizen or hold dual British nationality. 

This role requires the highest security clearance, known as Developed Vetting (DV). It’s something everyone in the UK Intelligence Community undertakes. 

Please note we have a strict drugs policy, so once you start your application, you can’t take any recreational drugs and you’ll need to declare your previous drug usage at the relevant stage.

Before applying, we recommend setting up a separate email address for your contact with us to ensure your personal and application correspondence remain separate. Try to avoid including identifying features in your email address, such as your first and/or surname and date of birth.  This is good practice and will help you manage your application with us more securely.

The role is based in Cheltenham so you’ll need to live within a commutable distance. Please consider any financial implications and practicalities before submitting an application, as we do not offer relocation costs.

We offer reasonable reimbursement of travel costs for candidates attending in-person appointments during the recruitment and vetting process. Full details will be provided with your interview or assessment invitation. Reimbursement is discretionary and will only be made in line with the Candidate Expenses Policy, as amended from time to time. Candidates must book their own travel, using the most economical option, and provide original hard copy receipts for reimbursement.

Please note: you should only launch your application from within the UK. If you are based overseas, you should wait until you visit the UK to begin your application. Applying from outside the UK will affect our ability to progress your application. You should not discuss your application, other than with your partner or a close family member.

Right to withdraw statement:

Please be aware that we reserve the right to bring forward the closing date for this role once a certain number of applications have been received. Please be mindful of this and submit your application at your earliest convenience to avoid disappointment.