Principal Technical Architect

Principal Technical Architect

Niyam IT is seeking a Principal Technical Architect to join our corporate engineering team. This is not a single-contract role. You will provide technical leadership and architectural direction across Niyam's federal programs, with your initial and primary assignment supporting one of our federal clients. As Niyam's portfolio grows, you will be positioned to shape technical strategy, mentor engineering talent, and contribute to solutions like Geo Cube and ARIA across multiple programs and clients, not just the contract you start on.

This role sits at the intersection of full stack engineering and applied AI. You will guide the integration of AI and machine learning capabilities into mobile and web applications, including virtual assistants and chatbots, AI-powered search and recommendation features, AI-powered accessibility, and AI-assisted developer tooling for test generation, debugging, and code refactoring. You will lead delivery of features from design through unit testing, integration testing, and production deployment via a cloud CI/CD Dev Sec Ops  pipeline, while also serving as a technical mentor and architectural voice within Niyam's broader engineering organization.

This is a hybrid position, and will require onsite to the client location in Ashburn, VA up to 3-4 days/week.

Roles and Responsibilities:

• Own and lead end-to-end solution architecture, ensuring technical solutions align with business, product, user, and mission objectives.
• Establish, evolve, and enforce architectural principles, technical standards, design patterns, and engineering guardrails.
• Lead technology evaluation and selection, system design, application architecture, and integration strategies across web, mobile, cloud, and AI-enabled solutions.
• Provide hands-on technical leadership throughout the software development lifecycle, including designing, developing, and reviewing critical application components, APIs, integrations, and shared services.
• Lead the integration of AI and machine learning capabilities into applications, including virtual assistants, chatbots, AI-powered search and recommendations, accessibility features, and AI-assisted development and testing tools.
• Translate complex technical requirements into scalable, incremental, and shippable solutions while supporting the development of technical backlogs, user stories, and solution increments.
• Collaborate closely with Product Owners, Scrum Masters, developers, architects, security, platform, and operations teams to ensure effective Agile delivery.
• Provide technical direction during sprint planning, execution, reviews, and demonstrations, helping teams resolve technical challenges and make informed design decisions.
• Guide architectural decision-making and maintain appropriate technical documentation, including architecture diagrams, technical specifications, and Architecture Decision Records (ADRs).
• Conduct code and design reviews to ensure adherence to coding standards, architectural principles, security requirements, and software engineering best practices.
• Ensure solutions meet non-functional requirements for security, performance, scalability, reliability, maintainability, accessibility, and operational readiness.
• Promote clean code, automated testing, CI/CD, Dev Sec Ops , infrastructure automation, and other modern software development and delivery practices.
• Identify, assess, and proactively reduce technical debt, architectural risk, and technical dependencies that could impact delivery or long-term maintainability.
• Mentor and coach developers on architecture, design patterns, coding practices, emerging technologies, and effective use of AI-assisted development tools.
• Communicate technical direction, architectural decisions, risks, dependencies, and trade-offs clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Support production readiness, deployment activities, incident resolution, troubleshooting, and ongoing operational stability of delivered solutions.
• Drive continuous improvement across architecture, code quality, development practices, automation, and delivery processes.
• Support technical demonstrations, proof-of-concepts, and evaluations of proposed solutions and technologies for internal and client stakeholders.

Required Qualifications:

• Must be a U.S. citizen and able to obtain and maintain a Top Secret (TS) security clearance.
• Bachelor's degree in GIS, Geography, Computer Science, Geospatial Engineering, or a related field (equivalent experience considered in lieu of degree).
• Must be available to work onsite in Ashburn, VA.
• 10+ years of professional full stack software development experience, including recent, hands-on work across frontend, backend, and API layers.
• Demonstrated experience with two or more of the following:
  Flutter, Angular (2+), Spring Boot, Java, Python (Django), JavaScript/Type Script, Dart, native iOS (Swift), or native Android.
• Experience integrating AI/ML capabilities into production applications (for example,…