Technical Architect - Contract

A Technical Architect provides technical leadership and architectural design for the products and services we build for the people of Barbados. You will translate complex business problems into sound technical designs, ensuring our services are built on solid foundations – reliable, secure, scalable, and maintainable. By working closely with developers, product managers, and wider government stakeholders, you will help us make good technology choices and deliver lasting value.

You'll take a hands-on approach to shaping technical direction, creating and communicating architecture decisions, and coaching the team on best practice. This role requires experience in designing and delivering digital services, navigating technical trade-offs, and making pragmatic decisions that balance quality, risk, and pace of delivery.

About the team

The GovTech Barbados team is responsible for developing multi-disciplinary, user-centred digital teams within the Government of Barbados. Our goals are twofold: first, we want to deliver tangible impact to citizens through excellent public service design and delivery. Second, we want to build a sustainable and enduring digital mindset, skillset, and culture within the government.

It's an exciting time to join us as we accelerate our delivery phase. We are taking an agile, lean approach to this work, learning as we go from our end-users, public servants, and global experts in digital transformation.

About the role

As a Technical Architect, you're a:

• Technical leader: You will define and own the technical direction for new digital services, making sure architectural decisions support the team's delivery goals and align with GovTech Barbados's wider technology strategy. You will track emerging technologies, patterns, and risks to ensure our approach remains sound.
• Designer of solutions: You will undertake structured analysis of technical challenges – translating them into clear, well-reasoned technical designs that the team can confidently build against. You'll identify appropriate design patterns, champion reuse of existing components and open-source tools, and ensure our services are built to be iterated on over time.
• Collaborator: You'll work as part of a multi-disciplinary team alongside product managers, delivery managers, developers, user researchers, and government subject matter experts. Since the team is still growing, you'll have a real opportunity to shape its technical culture and ways of working.
• Bridge between technical and non-technical: You can communicate effectively across organisational, technical, and political boundaries. You make complex technical concepts accessible for non-technical audiences – including senior government stakeholders – and can advocate for sound technical decisions to create trust and shared understanding.
• Coach and mentor: You will support developers and other team members to grow their skills, helping them understand architectural thinking and how their work contributes to the broader system. You'll act as an advocate for good engineering practice across the organisation.
• Pragmatic decision-maker: You understand how to balance ideal solutions against the realities of budget, capacity, and timelines. You'll identify and manage technical risks, make proportionate decisions, and ensure the team isn't blocked by architectural uncertainty.

We are a new team committed to working in the open and building an equitable working environment. There will be plenty of scope to influence how you interpret the role and shape the team culture as we grow.

Key responsibilities

• Define and communicate the technical architecture for GovTech Barbados’s digital services, ensuring designs reflect service risk, complexity, and maturity.
• Design and evolve shared platforms and integration patterns that enable ministries and agencies to connect and reuse capabilities through APIs and open standards.
• Work with Product and Delivery Managers to translate the product roadmap into a viable technical approach and sequence delivery effectively.
• Guide architectural decisions, manage technical risk, and ensure decisions are documented through diagrams and architecture decision records.
• Promote reuse, open-source solutions, and digital public goods aligned with the wider government technology strategy.
• Provide hands-on technical leadership to development teams, setting engineering standards, reviewing designs and code, and coaching developers.
• Guide cloud hosting, infrastructure, and engineering practices to ensure services are reliable, scalable, and operable, promoting CI/CD and infrastructure as code.
• Ensure services are designed with strong security, privacy, and responsible data practices, particularly when handling sensitive citizen data.
• Track emerging technologies and platform capabilities, advising the team and senior leadership on opportunities and risks.

Essential attributes

• Technical design throughout the life cycle: You can create technical designs for services of varying complexity, providing guidance and support to teams as they build and iterate. You adapt designs in response to what the team learns during delivery and use feedback to refine the approach over time.
• Architectural decision-making: You can work with others to make sound architectural decisions, identifying and addressing technical risks across your domain – including security, data, and infrastructure considerations. You engage with governance and assurance processes to manage decisions and risks effectively.
• Architecture communication: You can create and use different architecture representations to communicate effectively with both technical and non-technical stakeholders. You listen to the needs of the team and wider organisation, and can lead discussions about architectural topics within a multi-disciplinary setting.
• Whole-context thinking: You align your work with the broader organisational strategy and the work of other technical professionals. You track emerging issues, roadmaps, and technologies to assess opportunities and risks, and understand how different teams contribute to delivering outcomes.
• Strategy and standards: You can support the development and implementation of a technology strategy that aligns with organisational objectives. You challenge requirements and assumptions, use architectural principles and patterns, and can contribute to roadmaps and plans.
• Collaboration: You create the right environment for teams to work in, motivating and empowering developers to do their best work. You contribute to the work of others, recognise and deal with issues, and can identify the best team makeup for a given situation.

Technology environment

GovTech Barbados builds digital services using modern, open technologies and cloud-based infrastructure. Our technology choices aim to support reliable, scalable services that can evolve as needs change.

Our current environment includes:

• Cloud infrastructure platforms (for example AWS or similar)
• Modern web frameworks for building digital services
• API-first integration patterns to enable reuse and interoperability
• Open-source technologies and digital public goods where appropriate
• Continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) pipelines
• Automated testing and modern engineering practices
• As a Technical Architect, you will help shape how this technology environment evolves.

Terms of Reference

Terms of Reference for this contract are available here: Technical Architect