Principal System Architect

Job order - J - Permanent Full Time

Title Principal System Architect

Category Software Development/ Engineering

City Huntsville, Alabama, United States

Principal System Architect

CGI Federal is seeking a Principal System Architect to provide overarching technical leadership, architecture direction, and modernization strategy for a major federal transformation program. This senior-level role drives system-wide technical design, integration decisions, cloud alignment, modernization patterns, and enterprise architectural governance. The Principal System Architect partners across engineering, cloud, migration, Dev Sec Ops , security, and product teams to architect resilient, scalable, and secure mission-critical systems.

• Develop and lead the technical architecture vision, strategy, and roadmap for large-scale modernization
• Define system-wide patterns, standards, integration approaches, and modernization frameworks
• Ensure architectures align with cloud-native, microservice, and security-forward design principles

• Architect end-to-end solutions across application, data, security, and cloud layers
• Guide refactoring efforts, legacy system decomposition, and modernization of mission workloads
• Lead development of API architectures, interface definitions, platform integration points, and service boundaries

• Establish architecture standards, guardrails, and decision frameworks for engineering teams
• Conduct design reviews, validate technical approaches, and ensure alignment across work streams
• Provide authoritative direction for engineering decisions impacting scalability, performance, security, and reliability

• Partner with Full Stack Engineers, Cloud Engineers, Data Engineers, Dev Sec Ops  teams, QA Automation, and Product Leads
• Support integration with CI/CD pipelines, cloud deployments, and platform operations
• Provide technical leadership during sprint planning, backlog refinement, PI planning, and release readiness

• Ensure all system designs meet federal security standards, operational constraints, and compliance requirements
• Lead architectural risk identification and mitigation strategies
• Drive performance optimization efforts across system components and cloud infrastructures

• Produce architecture diagrams, system models, technical specifications, integration matrices, and decision records
• Maintain architecture documentation supporting audits, engineering continuity, and future enhancements
• Present architectural guidance to leadership and mission stakeholders

• Must have an Active Top Secret Security Clearance
• U.S. Citizenship
• Bachelor’s degree and 12+ years of experience in enterprise architecture, software engineering, or system design
• Extensive experience architecting large-scale, complex, cloud-enabled systems
• Expertise across application, integration, data, cloud, and security architecture domains
• Hands‑on experience with modern frameworks, microservices, distributed systems, and API design
• Strong understanding of Dev Sec Ops , CI/CD, and cloud platform engineering (AWS preferred)
• Exceptional communication and leadership skills for guiding multi‑team technical direction

• Experience supporting federal modernization or national‑security programs
• Deep knowledge of cloud‑native architectures, containerization (Docker), orchestration (Kubernetes), or serverless
• Familiarity with large‑scale data pipelines, ETL frameworks, and legacy modernization patterns
• Experience producing…