Senior Cloud Architect

• Set the strategic direction for the evolution of the platform’s technical architecture, ensuring modularity, scalability, interoperability, and adherence to enterprise standards

• Develop, maintain, and govern the system and platform architecture including High-Level Design (HLD) and Low-Level Design (LLD) documents that are professional, presentation-ready, and suitable for Government briefings

• Oversee system design, integration patterns, and architectural standards across all platform components and hosted applications

• Evaluate and recommend architectural approaches supporting scalability, performance, reliability, and cost optimization

• Coordinate architecture reviews for new capabilities, system enhancements, major platform changes, and tenant onboarding

• Ensure alignment of system architecture with Government enterprise architecture policies, technical standards, and the VA Technical Reference Model (TRM)

• Oversee system interoperability, data exchange patterns, and integration with external systems and services

• Identify and mitigate architectural risks impacting system performance, scalability, or maintainability

• Design multi-region architecture including failover patterns, deployment topologies, traffic management strategies, and data replication approaches

• Lead the design of the Scheduling Event Bus architecture incorporating event-driven integration, cross-region topic replication, schema versioning, and message durability

• Coordinate with development, maintenance, DevSecOps, SRE, and security teams to ensure architectural consistency across all platform components

• Ensure all architecture documentation accounts for current and planned future data flows, system integrations, functional and non-functional requirements, and supporting infrastructure

• Participate in Program Increment planning, architecture reviews, and change management activities

• Lead Architecture, Engineering, and Maintenance Assessments identifying risks, gaps, and opportunities for improvement

• Maintain regular communication with the Government COR and technical leadership regarding architectural decisions, system design considerations, and technical roadmap planning

• Demonstrated experience designing and governing architecture for complex enterprise platforms and mission-critical systems in a Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) environment

• Experience supporting Federal Government programs and enterprise-scale applications operating in cloud-based or hybrid environments

• Deep expertise in modern system architecture practices including microservices, containerized environments, event-driven architecture, and cloud-native platforms

• Hands-on experience with AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Kubernetes cluster architecture, and multi-tenant platform design

• Experience designing multi-region, high-availability architectures including failover patterns (active-active, active-passive, warm standby), traffic management, and disaster recovery

• Knowledge of AWS GovCloud services including EKS, RDS, S3, ElastiCache, DocumentDB, Kinesis, MSK, and Route 53

• Experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform or equivalent) and service mesh technologies (Istio or equivalent)

• Familiarity with event-driven integration frameworks including Apache Kafka, Amazon MSK, or equivalent event streaming platforms

• Understanding of Federal security requirements including RMF, FedRAMP, NIST SP 800-53, FIPS, and ATO authorization boundaries

• Knowledge of data consistency models, replication strategies, and cross-region data management patterns

• AWS Solutions Architect Professional certification required

• Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) or equivalent certification required

• Bachelor’s Degree from an accredited academic institution with a minimum of 10 years of experience in enterprise cloud architecture, with at least 5 years designing and governing architecture for mission-critical Federal Government or enterprise systems

• OR

• Master’s Degree from an accredited academic institution with a minimum of 7 years of experience in enterprise cloud architecture, with at least 3 years designing and governing architecture for mission-critical Federal Government or enterprise systems

• Plus:

• Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) experience

• Active Personal Identity Verification (PIV) card

• Experience with VA Enterprise Architecture, VIP Guide, and PLM Playbook alignment

• Experience designing multi-region architectures within AWS GovCloud

• Experience architecting platforms supporting 200+ applications across multiple environments

Up to $220,000 a year - Full-time, Contract