GIS Architect

The Opportunity Make a difference and advance your career by helping deliver some of the UK’s most important #tech4good projects, making the world a smarter, safer, greener, and healthier place. You’ll join a talented team of dynamic and driven professional problem solvers; creative thinkers and solutions builders who thrive on helping clients meet the most exciting digital transformation challenges. At a certified Great Place to Work® you’ll experience a dynamic and nurturing environment that rewards initiative and flexibility and enjoy a career path tailored to your own aspirations. About Us Founded in 1992, we are a successful, growing International digital transformation consultancy. We deliver multi-Queen’s Award for innovation winning platforms and services that support large-scale digital transformation. Our digital, data and technology solutions are used by globally recognised public and private sector brands operating in a variety of sectors including Civil Defence, Healthcare, Sustainable Environment and Land Asset Management, and Digital Democracy. About the role As a GIS Architect at Informed Solutions, you'll play a pivotal role in shaping the architecture and technical direction of innovative digital solutions that solve complex challenges across the public sector. The work you do will have a real and lasting impact on society, helping to make the UK healthier, safer, and more sustainable.   You'll lead the design of enterprise-scale geospatial solutions, working closely with multidisciplinary teams to define technical strategy, establish architectural standards, and ensure the successful delivery of scalable, secure and resilient digital services. You'll provide technical leadership throughout the project lifecycle, from discovery and solution design through to delivery and continuous improvement.   As a consultancy, we are proudly technology independent. Rather than prescribing technologies, we focus on selecting the right tools and platforms to solve our clients' challenges. Our teams work across a broad technology landscape, cloud hosting solutions, and a variety of modern GIS platforms and open-source geospatial technologies, giving you the opportunity to influence solution design using the best technology for each project.   Many of our projects leverage Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and open-source geospatial technologies, enabling clients to unlock the value of location intelligence through advanced mapping, spatial analysis and data integration.   This role offers flexibility to be based from our Altrincham (Manchester), Westminster (London), Leeds (Yorkshire) and Edinburgh (Scotland) offices where you'll be part of a collaborative, high-performing team environment, supported by our hybrid working approach.   Requirements Key responsibilities: - Shape technical solutions: Define end-to-end architecture for GIS-enabled digital services, ensuring solutions are scalable, secure, resilient and aligned to client and organisational objectives. - Provide technical leadership: Guide multidisciplinary delivery teams through architectural decisions, mentoring engineers and providing technical assurance throughout the software development lifecycle. - Design enterprise GIS solutions: Architect solutions that leverage GIS platforms, geospatial data, APIs and open-source mapping technologies to deliver innovative location-based services. - Collaborate across disciplines: Work closely with Software Engineers, Delivery Managers, User-Centred Design, Data Science and client stakeholders to translate business needs into effective technical solutions. - Champion best practice: Establish architectural standards, governance and design patterns, promoting quality, maintainability and security across delivery teams. - Influence technology strategy: Evaluate emerging technologies and advise clients and internal teams on the most appropriate tools, platforms and architectural approaches. - Support client engagement: Contribute to technical workshops, solution discovery, estimates, proposals and presentations, building trusted relationships with clients and partners. Key requirements: - Significant experience designing and delivering enterprise GIS and geospatial solutions within complex digital environments. - Strong understanding of software architecture, including distributed systems, microservices, event-driven and serverless architectures. - Experience designing cloud-native solutions using AWS and/or Azure. - Strong knowledge of GIS platforms, spatial data management and open-source geospatial technologies, including tools such as PostGIS, GeoServer, QGIS, Leaflet, OpenLayers or similar. - Experience integrating geospatial services and APIs into enterprise applications. - Strong understanding of architecture governance, security, scalability and non-functional requirements. - Experience working within Agile delivery teams and collaborating across multidisciplinary teams. - Excellent stakeholder engagement and communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences. - Experience mentoring and providing technical leadership to engineering teams. Desirable skills - Experience working within a consultancy environment, supporting multiple clients and projects. - Experience delivering solutions within the UK public sector. - Knowledge of Digital Service Standard, Technology Code of Practice and Government Digital Service (GDS) principles. - Experience with DevOps practices, CI/CD pipelines and Infrastructure as Code using tools such as Terraform or Jenkins. - Familiarity with enterprise GIS platforms such as Esri ArcGIS Enterprise alongside open-source geospatial ecosystems. - Experience defining technical roadmaps, architectural governance and technology strategy. - Professional certifications in cloud platforms, enterprise architecture or GIS technologies. Senior colleagues, experts, and leaders at Informed Solutions are committed to supporting, coaching, upskilling, and enabling the success and career progression of each other. There are some foundation areas, however, which you need to possess to be able to successfully contribute to your team and work alongside others.    Key abilities that are necessary for success - Able to work effectively in environments where you can adapt to innovative practices involving uncertainty, change, and agile working. - Ability to manage competing priorities and your time so you can deliver high-quality work within deadlines. - Good interpersonal skills, with the ability to respect and accept different perspectives and disagreement, work collaboratively in diverse teams, and maintain positive working relationships. - Good judgement and decision-making in complex environments where uncertainty, ambiguity, and risk must be collaboratively managed by working supportively alongside others. - Good communication skills, including clear, constructive written outputs and measured, respectful verbal delivery.   We work in a fast-paced, ever-evolving innovation and problem-solving workplace environment where no two days are the same. This requires you to have the foundations of personal resilience, professional adaptability, and flexibility in working alongside others with a positive mindset. We appreciate that this workplace culture and the level of variety won’t suit everyone.  However, after significant consultations with colleagues at all levels, we understand that these are the fundamentals of success in undertaking the complex, innovation work which is the DNA of Informed Solutions. These shared foundations are important to team cohesion, performance, and mutual personal support. As colleagues, we thrive in successfully problem solving together to deliver real-world impact; and value the variety of challenges and opportunities to learn, grow, and progress on a personal and professional level. Benefits Benefits Our benefits package compliments our highly competitive salaries and our great working environment. We believe that our people should be properly rewarded for their commitment to the continued success of our business through a comprehensive and flexible range of benefits.  These can include: - InformedACADEMY™ – We offer excellent career development opportunities through our award-winning personal and professional development programmes, including support with professional certifications. - Industry leading health and wellbeing plan – We partner with several wellbeing support functions to cater to each individuals need, including 24/7 GP services, mental health support and physical health support. - Hybrid working* - Private Health Care Cover* - Generous life assurance cover* - Gym Membership* - Monthly office lunch - Onsite massage sessions - 25 paid working days holiday per year plus bank holidays* - Sabbatical Leave Scheme* - Enhanced Maternity Leave and Pay* - Enhanced Paternity Leave and Pay* - Company Pension Contribution - Profit Share Scheme* - Payment of professional subscriptions - Generous referral scheme with no limits on the number of referrals  *Qualifying period applies Culture We are proud to nurture a workplace culture that is diverse, inclusive, rewarding, and egalitarian. We strive to live up to our values of Innovation, Excellence, and Integrity by thinking about things differently, always doing our best, and acting in good faith at all times. We’re a team of passionate problem solvers. We take pride in helping our clients accelerate and de-risk digital business change so that we can collaborate and codesign world class digital services that solve complex business and safety critical problems, particularly where place, location or geography are important. Our workplace culture reflects how we go about our work, the type of work that we choose to do, and our commitment and contribution to the sustainable social, environmental, and economic development aims of the communities that we are part of.  We focus both on technical skills and equally importantly, on the cultural fit of prospective new colleagues. Our success relies on fostering an environment where creativity and collaboration produces great outcomes for our people, our clients, and our partners.