Principal Security Architect

Made Tech; Bristol; Hybrid; GBP 93,000 - 115,000; Full time

Job summary

A consulting firm in the UK is seeking a Principal Security Architect to lead security aspects of client projects and build trusted relationships. Responsibilities include coaching teams, ensuring quality delivery, and driving business development. The ideal candidate will have substantial public sector experience, eligibility for SC clearance, and a passion for enhancing client services through innovative solutions. This role also involves managing resources effectively and fostering a culture of continuous improvement within the organization.

Benefits

30 days holiday

Flexible parental leave

Remote working options

Paid counseling and advice services

Qualifications

• Experience in delivering complex public sector services.
• Ability to innovate from commercial sector insights.
• Strong communication and leadership skills.

Responsibilities

• Lead security architecture for client engagements.
• Coach team members and ensure client satisfaction.
• Drive business development and manage third-party relationships.

Skills

Understanding public sector challenges

Ability to innovate

Building trusted advisor relationships

Leading high-performing teams

Education

SC clearance eligibility

Job description

Principal Security Architect

Department: Technology

Employment Type: Permanent

Location: Any UK Office Hub (Bristol / London / Manchester / Swansea)

Compensation: GBP 93,800 - GBP 115,000 / year

Description

Our Principal Security Architects lead and deliver strategically significant, complex client engagements across our portfolio of clients. We believe that great delivery stems from a thorough understanding of our clients and their needs, strong discipline skills and subject matter expertise, excellent leadership and a clear vision of lasting and effective change in a public sector environment. We expect our Principal Security Architects to bring all of that and enthuse our delivery teams with the same passion.

The successful candidate will lead the Security Architecture aspects of our client engagements while overseeing the wider delivery within the account (or industry) when appropriate. They will coach and develop team members on their engagements providing them with detailed performance feedback, as well as monitoring overall delivery to achieve the highest levels of client satisfaction.

In addition, our Principal Security Architects are responsible for engaging with our clients to understand their challenges and build lasting, trusted advisor relationships. They will also oversee multiple, concurrent client deliveries to help ensure quality and drive the sharing of best practice across our engagements and industries.

Our Principal Security Architects are members of the Practice leadership team with the responsibility to develop the capability of the practice to meet business needs and to accelerate the growth of the practice, their account and the wider business.

You will be responsible for the practice and service line‑specific delivery elements of your engagement/account as well as a shared ownership for the overall delivery of client outcomes. You will leverage your client and delivery insight to support the account and industry teams to identify opportunities and develop client solutions.

Key Responsibilities

• Collaborate with clients to understand their needs, provide solution advice in your role as a trusted advisor and shape solutions that leverage Made Tech’s wider capabilities and credentials.
• Assess project performance as a part of the billable delivery team, Quality Assure (QA) the deliverables and outcomes, and ensure client satisfaction. Coach and mentor team members as well as providing direction to enable them to achieve their engagement outcomes and to develop their careers.
• Act as a Technical Authority (of your appropriate capability) to provide oversight and ensure alignment with internal and industry best practices. Ensure engagement experience is captured and used to improve standards and contribute to Made Tech knowledge.
• Participate in business development activities, including bids and pre‑sales within the account, industry and practice. Coach team members on their contributions and oversee the relevant technical aspects of the proposal submission.
• Undertake people management responsibilities, including performance reviews and professional development of your engagement and practice colleagues.
• Serve as a thought leader within Made Tech, our account engagements and the wider public sector and represent the company at industry events.

Skills, Knowledge & Expertise

Client

• Understanding of the issues and challenges that the public sector faces in delivering services that make the best use of data and digital capabilities, transforming legacy infrastructure, and taking an innovative and user‑centric approach.
• Ability to innovate and take learnings from the commercial sector, other countries and advances in technology and apply them to UK Public Sector challenges to create tangible solutions for our clients.
• Experience building trusted advisor relationships with senior client stakeholders within the public sector.

Leadership

• Experience of building and leading high performing, consulting teams and creating the leveraged engagements to provide a cost‑effective, profitable, successful client‑facing delivery.
• Leadership of bids and solution shaping to produce compelling proposals that help Made Tech win new business and grow the industry.
• Experience of managing third‑party partnerships and suppliers (in conjunction with Made Tech colleagues) to provide a consolidated and seamless delivery team to clients.

People Management

• Ambassadors of belonging at Made Tech, advocating and championing organisational commitments and priorities, recognising their role in modelling the way and embodying our values.
• Compelling communicators, ensuring key information is swiftly cascaded, understood, and feedback gathered and shared.
• Using their coaching skills to enable people to be their best, regularly and routinely providing meaningful, positive and constructive feedback.
• Make decisions that support the best interests of the business while recognising that our people are its foundation. Strive to achieve the best outcomes for individuals through persuasive and persistent efforts, ensuring these decisions uphold both the short‑ and long‑term sustainability of the business.
• Inspire innovation and spark curiosity, encourage people to be positively disruptive and challenge the status quo.
• Seek collective success above personal glory, strive to ensure a constant culture of inclusion, trust and transparency.
• Lead your direct reports and positively influence the wider organisation as an inspiring people manager in line with our people manager objectives and key results.

Practice

• Experience in delivering complex and difficult engagements that span multiple capabilities for user‑facing digital and data services in the public sector.
• Experience in identifying opportunities based on client needs and developing targeted solutions to progress the development of the opportunity.
• Experience of working with sales professionals and commercial responsibility for strategic organisational goals.

Practice Architecture

• You will be responsible for the security‑specific delivery elements of your engagement/account, as well as a shared ownership for the overall delivery of secure client outcomes. You will leverage your client and delivery insight to support the account and industry teams to identify security opportunities and develop compliant, strategic solutions.
• The right person for this role will do this by combining their technical security discipline, leadership skills, and industry network with deep experience of delivering assured digital services and complex security transformations for the Public Sector.
• Act as the Principal Security Architect on high‑assurance projects, leading the design and build of mission‑critical applications and authoring comprehensive security documentation (HLDs/LLDs).
• Coordinate and lead project assurance activities, ensuring compliance with relevant frameworks (e.g., GovAssure, JSP 604) and supporting the client in securing Authority to Operate (ATO) status.
• Implement and manage security risk processes (e.g., NIST RMF), producing assurance and risk artefacts, and embedding a culture of continuous risk management.
• Collaborate with clients to understand their security needs, provide solution advice as a trusted advisor, and shape solutions that embed Secure by Design (SbD) principles from inception.
• Lead security maturity assessments (e.g., against ISO 27001, NIST CSF, DevSecOps practices) and deliver remediation roadmaps to uplift client cyber resilience and support external audit requirements.

Job Benefits

We are always listening to our growing teams and evolving the benefits available to our people. As we scale, as do our benefits and we are scaling quickly. We've recently introduced a flexible benefit platform which includes a Smart Tech scheme, Cycle to work scheme, and an individual benefits allowance which you can invest in a Health care cash plan or Pension plan. We're also big on connection and have an optional social and wellbeing calendar of events for all employees to join should they choose.

Here are some of our most popular benefits listed below:

30 days Holiday – we offer 30 days of paid annual leave + bank holidays!

Flexible Parental Leave – we offer flexible parental leave options

Remote Working – we offer part time remote working for all our staff

Paid counselling – we offer paid counselling as well as financial and legal advice.

Eligibility & Clearance

An increasing number of our customers are specifying a minimum of SC (security check) clearance in order to work on their projects. As a result, we’re looking for all successful candidates for this role to have eligibility. Eligibility for SC requires 5 years’ of continuous UK residency. Please note that if at any point during the interview process it is apparent that you may not be eligible for SC, we won’t be able to progress your application and we will contact you to let you know why.

Support in Applying

If you need this job description in another format, or other support in applying, please email [e-mail].

We believe we can use tech to make public services better. We also believe this can happen best when our own team represents the society that actually uses the services we work on. We're collectively continuing to grow a culture that is happy, healthy, safe and inspiring for people of all backgrounds and experiences, so we encourage people from underrepresented groups to apply for roles with us.

When you apply, we’ll put you in touch with a talent partner who can help with any needs or adjustments we may need to make to help with your application. This includes alternative formats for documents, the time allotted for interviews and any other needs. We also welcome any feedback on how we can improve the experience for future candidates.

We’re committed to building a happy, inclusive and diverse workforce. You can get a sense of what it’s like working here from our blog, where we talk about mental health, communities of practice and neurodiversity (as well as our client work and best practice).

Like many organisations, we use Slack to foster a sense of community and connection. As well as special interest groups such as music, food and pets, we also have 10+ Slack channels dedicated to specific communities, allies, and identities as well as dedicated learning spaces called communities of practice (COPs). If you’d like to speak to someone from one of these groups about their experience as an employee, please do let a member of the Made Tech talent team know.