Cloud Platform Architect

Overview

The Cloud Platform Architect defines the target-state technical architecture and long-term platform strategy for secure, resilient, scalable hybrid and multi-cloud mission environments. This role establishes architectural direction, governance, technical standards, and reference patterns for enterprise cloud modernization while remaining hands-on in prototyping, validating, automating, and troubleshooting platform capabilities.

• Define target-state architectures for hybrid and multi-cloud platforms supporting Department of War (DoW) mission requirements.
• Establish enterprise and program-level architecture principles, technology standards, reference architectures, reusable design patterns, and configuration baselines.
• Develop strategies for integrating on-premises data centers with Azure, AWS, and other authorized cloud environments.
• Design, prototype, and validate platform architectures covering compute, storage, networking, identity, security, data, containers, observability, automation, backup, disaster recovery, and continuity of operations.
• Build and maintain proof-of-concept, prototype, and reference platform environments to validate architectural designs, technology selections, security controls, and integration patterns.
• Develop, review, and troubleshoot infrastructure-as-code using Terraform, Bicep, AWS Cloud Formation, Ansible, or comparable automation frameworks.
• Design, deploy, configure, and troubleshoot cloud and hybrid-networking components, including virtual networks, subnets, routing, network-security controls, firewalls, load balancers, private connectivity, virtual private networks, and Domain Name System services.
• Implement and validate identity, access, and privileged-access patterns using cloud identity services, role-based access control, federation, conditional access, secrets management, and policy-as-code capabilities.
• Deploy, configure, secure, and troubleshoot container platforms and supporting services, including Kubernetes clusters, container registries, ingress, workload identity, and cluster security controls.
• Develop and validate Dev Sec Ops  pipelines that incorporate source control, automated testing, artifact management, infrastructure deployment, container scanning, security checks, and configuration-compliance capabilities.
• Configure and tune observability capabilities, including centralized logging, metrics, alerting, tracing, dashboards, service-health monitoring, and incident-response integrations.
• Conduct hands-on performance, resiliency, backup, recovery, failover, and disaster-recovery testing; document results, identify gaps, and recommend remediation.
• Analyze cloud configurations, logs, network flows, security findings, and operational telemetry to diagnose complex infrastructure and application-platform issues.
• Ensure architecture decisions and technical implementations align with mission objectives, cybersecurity requirements, Zero Trust principles, resiliency goals, and operational constraints.
• Evaluate emerging cloud and platform technologies through technical research, prototypes, and testing, and determine their applicability to the mission environment.
• Lead architecture reviews and adjudicate technical tradeoffs among performance, security, cost, interoperability, portability, and maintainability.
• Define migration and modernization strategies for legacy infrastructure and applications, including sequencing, transition architectures, implementation dependencies, and rollback considerations.
• Establish architecture-governance processes, technical decision records, exception processes, configuration standards, implementation documentation, build guides, and operational runbooks.
• Participate in technical working sessions, code and infrastructure-as-code reviews, design reviews, and operational-readiness reviews; provide practical engineering feedback based on implementation results.
• Collaborate directly with cloud engineers, cybersecurity personnel, network engineers, application teams, and operations staff to resolve implementation issues and transition architectures into operational use.
• Provide senior technical leadership and briefings…