Solutions Architect

Job Title: Solutions Architect

Location: This post will primarily be located in one of the core Client Offices e.g. Ballina, Co. Mayo; Loughrea Co. Galway; Bowe Street, Dublin or other such place designated as convenient to the winning candidate. (Hybrid)

Start Date: 26th October 2026 or as soon as possible thereafter

Contract Duration: 12 Months with further extension

About the Client

The Client is a statutory public-sector organisation responsible for delivering critical national services and supporting strategic programmes through technology, innovation and operational excellence.

The Client’s Technology Platforms & Solutions team acts as a strategic technology partner to the business, delivering and supporting business-critical systems and services for internal and external users.

Role Overview

The Client is seeking an experienced Senior Solutions Architect to provide technical leadership across solution architecture, technology delivery and the ongoing evolution of the organisation’s target technical architecture.

The role will ensure that technology solutions are fit for purpose, aligned to business requirements, scalable, secure, maintainable and consistent with the Client’s architecture standards and principles.

The successful candidate will work closely with business and technology stakeholders, providing expert architectural guidance and proactively identifying opportunities to improve technology solutions and capabilities.

Requirements

Mandatory Requirements (Pass / Fail): Candidates MUST meet ALL of the following:

Experience

· It is a mandatory requirement, that the Resource proposed has the equivalent of a Senior resource i.e., 7 years + of relevant IT experience.

Qualifications

· It is a mandatory requirement, that the Resource proposed hold the following qualifications or equivalents:

o At a minimum, hold Level 8 on the National Framework of Qualifications with computing/computational modules taken in the final year.

Availability

· Must be available to start from 26th October 2026.

Driving Licence

· Full driving licence required

English Language Proficiency (MANDATORY):

· Native English speaker OR

· CEFR C2 Proficiency/Mastery (or equivalent)

· If there is no certificate, fluency will be assessed at presentation stage

Key Deliverables:

The following non-exhaustive list of Key Deliverables are applicable to this Role.

The Solutions Architect will work in the Technology, Platforms and Solutions directorate in the CLIENT and will ultimately be responsible for designing and implementing technical solutions that align with the CLIENT’s technology and business goals and requirements.

The Solutions Architect is the Subject Matter Expert (SME) for any technology decisions, challenges and conflicts within the organization.

The Solutions Architect must demonstrate a proven ability to undertake structured analysis of technical issues, translating this analysis into technical designs that describe a solution. They must ensure that any proposed solution adheres as closely as possible to the CLIENT’s Architectural Standards and Principles. They should also ensure that any proposed solution adheres to recognised Architectural Design Patterns.

They must also provide technical leadership, strategic vision and architectural design across a broad range of solutions, both public facing and internal.

Professional Fundamentals

a) Technical Expertise: Comprehensive understanding of various technologies, platforms, and frameworks. Proficiency in designing scalable, reliable, and secure systems architectures that meet business requirements.

b) Strategic Thinking and Planning - Ability to align technical solutions with the CLIENT's technology and business strategic goals and requirements. Capable of creating technology roadmaps that outline the future state of technology systems and the steps required to achieve them.

c) Relationship Management – Maintains and improves relationships with all internal and external stakeholders

d) Stakeholder Engagement: Maintains and improves relationships with all internal and external stakeholders. Understand their needs and communicate technical concepts in a clear and non-technical manner. Working closely with development teams, project managers, and other technology leads to ensure successful implementation of solutions.

e) Influencer - relates to people, builds relationships, negotiates well, effectively presents arguments

f) Results seeker – meets deadlines, identifies actions, achieves goals

g) Leader - not afraid to have regular, open, and sometimes difficult conversation.

Responsibilities

· Collaborate with business stakeholders to understand their needs, goals, and constraints. Analyse business requirements to ensure they are clearly defined and understood.

· Translate business requirements into technical architecture artefacts (including Diagrams, Functional Specifications and Technical Requirements)

· Design solutions ensuring that all solutions adhere to industry standards, best practices, and CLIENT principals including implementing security best practices to protect systems and data from threat and compliant with relevant regulatory requirements and standards.

· Ensure maximum alignment with the Target Architecture across all project/initiative deliverables.

· Work on refining the Target Technical Architecture for the CLIENT.

· Ensure that the latest Technical Architecture is documented, maintained and made available through the CLIENT’s agreed architecture documentation approach, ensuring alignment with the defined Business Architecture.

· Provide technical leadership and guidance to development teams and systems analyst throughout the project lifecycle.

o Work with the Development Team Lead to agree the technical design of the proposed solution.

o Break down the development effort into distinct work packages.

o Work with the Development Team to provide estimates for the development effort.

o Conduct code and design reviews to ensure adherence to architectural standards and best practices.

o Assist in troubleshooting and resolving technical issues that arise during development and implementation.

· Provide technical support to project stakeholders

o Assist project managers in planning and estimating project timelines, resources, and costs.

o Monitor project progress and provide updates to stakeholders, ensuring alignment with project plans.

o Provide relevant and accurate technical input into projects through engagement with project stakeholders.

· Provide feedback to the Enterprise, Solutions and Business Architects in terms of any potential gaps or deviations between the Target Architecture and project deliverables.

· Monitoring on-going risks and provide mitigations and resolutions

· Help to ensure that KPIs for the Solutions Architecture Team and Technical Solutions Delivery team are defined and being met.

· Working with third parties in the delivery of projects.

o Reviewing estimates to provide assurances on accuracy and achievability.

o Review of Technical documentation and artefacts to ensure correctness and understandability.

o Review of agreed deliverables.

o Management of feedback.

o Tracking and management of issues.

This job description is not intended to be a comprehensive list of all duties involved and consequently, the post holder may be required to perform other duties as appropriate to the post which may be assigned to him / her from time to time and to contribute to the development of the post while in the role.

Key Experience/Competencies/Skillsets:

The following Experience/Competencies/Skillsets are applicable to this Role.

· Experience in the design and implementation of Enterprise grade, high performance, mission critical applications and solutions – Public websites and customer portals, CRM, Document Management Solutions, Telephony Solutions.

· Strong understanding of, and experience in Cloud native architectures (SaaS / Paas / iPaas / Containers / Kubernetes / Docker / Serverless / CI-CD)

· Excellent knowledge of databases including Relational Data Design e.g. MS SQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Postgres, DataVerse.

· Full-stack design experience

· Front end - ReactJS, VueJS, Angular, Power Portals, UI Frameworks

· Back End - Java, Spring, .NET (C#, VB.Net)

· Integrations - Micro-services, web-services, event queues, message queues, integration services

· Experience in the design and delivery of workflow automation and low-code/no-code platform solutions, including Power Automate, Azure Logic Apps, Power Apps or equivalent technologies.

· Thorough understanding of Application Security Models

· Working knowledge of Linux operating systems such as AlmaLinux, Centos, and RedHat.

· Knowledge of NoSQL databases such as MongoDB

· Experience in DevOps and exposure to all DevOps areas like Source Control, Continuous Integration, Infra Automation, Continuous Deployment, including experience working with Application Lifecycle Tools such as Azure DevOps.

· Strong knowledge and understanding of Architectural Design Patterns.

· Strong communication skills, in both technical and non-technical environments.

· Ability to quickly research and learn new technologies, tools and techniques

· Ability to lead teams

· Ability to lead on technology selection.