AWS Architect (National Security)

Location: UK-based (hybrid secure-site working required)
Salary: £120,000 base + DV bonus + benefits
Clearance: Must hold highest level of clearance in UK National Security

The Opportunity

You will be joining a specialist engineering consultancy delivering secure cloud and software platforms into the UK’s National Security ecosystem.

The organisation is a small but highly experienced team focused on solving complex engineering problems across cyber, cloud and secure data systems. Their expertise often centres around operating across trust boundaries and enabling secure data movement between environments while maintaining strong security controls.

This particular programme involves helping a major customer migrate a large application estate into the cloud. The environment includes dozens of applications maintained by multiple teams, making the challenge less about lifting infrastructure and more about understanding systems, defining migration strategies and guiding the organisation through a long-term platform transition.

The programme is expected to run for several years and involves working closely with both engineering teams and senior stakeholders. Architects are trusted to provide recommendations, shape technical direction and help the customer navigate their journey into modern cloud environments.

Unlike larger consultancies where architectural roles can become heavily constrained by governance layers, the expectation here is that the successful candidate will drive the technical approach, with Senior Leadership trusting your judgement and recommendations.

The Role

As a Cloud Architect you will take a leading role in helping the customer design and execute their migration from on-premise environments into modern cloud platforms.

Typical responsibilities include:

• Defining cloud migration strategies for complex application estates moving from on-premise environments into AWS-based cloud platforms
• Designing cloud-native architectures incorporating microservices, containerisation and scalable infrastructure patterns
• Supporting development teams implementing services using technologies such as Docker, Kubernetes and modern CI/CD pipelines
• Advising on Infrastructure as Code approaches and automated deployment strategies
• Ensuring security considerations are embedded throughout platform and application design
• Working with stakeholders to understand system dependencies and plan realistic migration pathways
• Providing architectural leadership across engineering teams while influencing long-term platform evolution

please note that the client places far more emphasis on architectural thinking, stakeholder engagement and problem-solving ability than on matching a specific set of tools.

This role is particularly well suited to architects who enjoy operating at the intersection of technical design, engineering delivery and customer engagement, rather than purely producing documentation or working within narrow architectural frameworks.

You will be trusted to influence technical direction, mentor engineers and help shape how complex legacy systems evolve into modern cloud platforms.

Security Requirements

Due to the nature of the work, candidates must meet the criteria required to obtain the highest level of UK security clearance. This typically requires sole UK nationality and long-term UK residency.

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