Platform Architect - Remote

About the Role

• Integrate platform components with identity and access services, directory services, authentication, authorization, and security controls. • Communicate architectural options, trade-offs, risk assessments to USCIS leadership and stakeholders. • Define platform reference architectures, blueprints, standards, patterns, and best practices; ensure consistency and compliance across the enterprise. • Oversee and/or contribute to platform operations, including release and deployment pipelines, automation, CI/CD, configuration management, infrastructure as code (IaC). • Lead the architectural design, evaluation, and implementation of enterprise platform services including compute, storage, virtualization, containerization, serverless, orchestration, and middleware. • Ensure cost optimization: monitor usage, make architectural trade-offs, implement cost controls, manage spend across cloud and on-premise infrastructure. • Incorporate security and compliance into platform design: ensure platforms adhere to applicable federal standards (e.g. NIST, FedRAMP, FISMA, DHS policy), enforce secure baselines, hardening, logging/audit, patching, vulnerability management. • Design and guide platform strategy across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments for USCIS. • May be responsible for both strategic and hands-on technical work. • Lead efforts on cloud migration, modernization, scalability (autoscaling, load balancing), disaster recovery, high availability, redundancy. • Collaborate with application developers, infrastructure, network, security, and operations teams to ensure platform architectures meet performance, availability, reliability, and security SLAs. • Mentor and guide other architects, engineers, and operations staff; facilitate knowledge transfer. • Review vendor products / third-party tools / COTS solutions with respect to platform fit, cost, maintenance, security, and roadmap alignment. • Perform capacity planning, resource provisioning strategy, monitoring, and tuning of platform performance. • Maintain architecture documentation: system diagrams, interface definitions, data flows, platform lifecycle plans, disaster recovery / failover plans.

Key Responsibilities

• ▸identity integration
• ▸reference architecture
• ▸ci/cd automation
• ▸cloud migration
• ▸cost optimization
• ▸security compliance

What You Bring

• Strong security background: secure architecture, compliance frameworks, identity management, zero trust, auditing / logging. • Excellent communication skills: able to work with technical and non-technical stakeholders, present architecture decisions, write technical documentation. • Familiarity with Zero Trust architectures and strategy. • Experience with platform monitoring, telemetry, observability tools. • Prior experience working on federal or DHS / USCIS contracts, or in regulated environments. • Proficiency in automation, IaC (Terraform, CloudFormation, Azure ARM, etc.), configuration management, CI/CD pipelines. • Solid skills in performance tuning, capacity planning, scalability, reliability engineering. • Deep experience with multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, and on-premises platform deployments (e.g., AWS, Azure, GCP). • Experience with modern DevOps / DevSecOps practices. • Ability to travel or work with geographically dispersed teams if required. • Strong experience with core platform technologies: virtualization (VMware, Hyper-V, etc.), container orchestration (Kubernetes, OpenShift, etc.), serverless, microservices, middleware, networking for platforms. • Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a closely related field. Advanced degree preferred. • Senior / SME level; likely expected to lead or have oversight over other architects/engineers. • Certifications such as AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Microsoft Azure Solutions Architect, Google Cloud Professional Architect, Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP), etc. • Compliance with all USCIS / DHS policies, guidelines, and security training. • U.S. Citizenship and ability to meet USCIS / DHS clearance/suitability requirements. • Typically, 10+ years of experience in platform architecture or similar roles in large-scale enterprise environments. • Experience with emerging tech relevant to USCIS modernization: AI/ML platform integration, edge computing, etc.

Requirements

• ▸zero trust
• ▸iac
• ▸kubernetes
• ▸aws
• ▸cissp
• ▸senior

Work Environment

Remote