Technical Lead / Solution Architect

We are seeking a Technical Lead / Solution Architect to own the technical direction of a strangler-fig modernization: a legacy Java estate on one side, a Kubernetes and Kafka cloud platform on the other, and live users depending on both. This position offers architecture-level ownership of a widely adopted, open-source public health platform., As Technical Lead, you own the technical approach across both halves of a strangler-fig modernization: sustaining a legacy estate (Java application server on Windows, SQL Server, SAS, and integration-engine interfaces) while expanding its cloud-native successor (Kubernetes on AWS and Azure provisioned with Terraform and Helm, Spring microservices, Kafka and Debezium pipelines, Elasticsearch, NiFi, Keycloak, and a React front end). The codebase ships as open source, and multiple organizations contribute to it, which makes architecture governance a daily discipline rather than a document.

What You’ll Do Own the architecture

• Set and defend the technical approach for decomposing legacy functions into microservices without breaking users in production
• Govern architecture across a multi-vendor codebase, including reviewing and integrating code merges from other contributors
• Keep every component deployable on multiple cloud providers without modification, per contract requirements
• Write and maintain architecture decision records so decisions outlive the people who made them

Lead the engineering

• Guide development teams across Java/Spring services, the React UI, data pipelines (Kafka, Debezium, NiFi, Elasticsearch), and SQL Server persistence
• Direct the technical side of record matching, electronic case reporting, and configuration tooling modernization workstreams, completing in-progress work
• Maintain a strong security posture: current dependencies, urgent vulnerability remediation on defined clocks (15 days critical, 30 days high), and audit-ready evidence
• Own technical quality gates: unit test, static analysis, dependency, container, and infrastructure scanning enforced before merge and release

Connect architecture to mission

• Work with the Public Health Informatician and Epidemiology SME so architecture decisions serve surveillance workflows
• Support migration engineering for multiple jurisdiction onboardings per year, including environment setup and configuration validation
• Advise the program manager on technical feasibility during sprint planning and release sequencing

Your day to day

• Chair design reviews and adjudicate pull requests, including cross-vendor merges
• Review pipeline health and scan results with the DevSecOps lead; triage new vulnerabilities against remediation clocks
• Serve as the final technical escalation for production incidents behind the help desk tiers
• Pair with workstream leads on the hard problems: matching algorithm integration, event pipeline resilience, legacy interface quirks
• Keep the public demonstration environment current with the latest general availability release
• Publish and refresh engineering standards (branching, build, artifact, signing, scanning) on a quarterly cadence

• Master’s degree and at least 8 years of relevant experience, or Bachelor’s with equivalent substitution
• Hands-on architecture ownership of Kubernetes-based microservice platforms (EKS or AKS, Terraform, Helm)
• Depth in Java/Spring and event-driven architectures (Kafka or equivalent), plus production experience with search or pipeline tooling such as Elasticsearch and NiFi
• Experience sustaining legacy Java estates alongside modernization work

Preferred

• Open-source project delivery, ideally in government contexts
• Prior work on health or public health data systems; HL7 exposure
• Windows container and SQL Server operational experience
• Section 508 and accessibility-aware front-end engineering

3.53.5 out of 5 stars Remote $155,000 - $170,000 a year - Full-time, * Location: remote (contractor facility), with core-hours availability 8:00 AM to 4:30 PM ET.

• Occasional domestic travel to client and stakeholder sites.
• All personnel must be able to obtain a federal background investigation commensurate with position sensitivity and a PIV credential. No security clearance is required.
• This position is contingent upon contract award, with an anticipated start in October 2026.

Salary Information

• $155,000.00 to $170,000.00 - commensurate with experience and skillset