Platform Architect - Remote

The Platform Architect SME will provide expert-level technical leadership and architectural oversight for enterprise platforms used across USCIS. The role focuses on designing, integrating, securing, optimizing, and evolving platforms that support applications, infrastructure, identity, operations, and cloud and hybrid deployments. The SME ensures platform solutions align with enterprise goals, regulatory compliance, performance, cost, security, and scalability requirements.

• Lead the architectural design, evaluation, and implementation of enterprise platform services including compute, storage, virtualization, containerization, serverless, orchestration, and middleware.
• Design and guide platform strategy across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments for USCIS.
• Define platform reference architectures, blueprints, standards, patterns, and best practices; ensure consistency and compliance across the enterprise.
• Integrate platform components with identity and access services, directory services, authentication, authorization, and security controls.
• Collaborate with application developers, infrastructure, network, security, and operations teams to ensure platform architectures meet performance, availability, reliability, and security SLAs.
• Lead efforts on cloud migration, modernization, scalability (autoscaling, load balancing), disaster recovery, high availability, redundancy.
• Perform capacity planning, resource provisioning strategy, monitoring, and tuning of platform performance.
• 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.
• Oversee and/or contribute to platform operations, including release and deployment pipelines, automation, CI/CD, configuration management, infrastructure as code (IaC).
• Mentor and guide other architects, engineers, and operations staff; facilitate knowledge transfer.
• Maintain architecture documentation: system diagrams, interface definitions, data flows, platform lifecycle plans, disaster recovery / failover plans.
• Review vendor products / third-party tools / COTS solutions with respect to platform fit, cost, maintenance, security, and roadmap alignment.
• Communicate architectural options, trade-offs, risk assessments to USCIS leadership and stakeholders.

• U.S. Citizenship and ability to meet USCIS / DHS clearance/suitability requirements.
• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a closely related field. Advanced degree preferred.
• Typically, 10+ years of experience in platform architecture or similar roles in large‑scale enterprise environments.
• Deep experience with multi‑cloud, hybrid cloud, and on‑premises platform deployments (e.g., AWS, Azure, GCP).
• Strong experience with core platform technologies: virtualization (VMware, Hyper‑V, etc.), container orchestration (Kubernetes, Open Shift, etc.), serverless, microservices, middleware, networking for platforms.
• Proficiency in automation, IaC (Terraform, Cloud Formation, Azure ARM, etc.), configuration management, CI/CD pipelines.
• Strong security background: secure architecture, compliance frameworks, identity management, zero trust, auditing / logging.
• Solid skills in performance tuning, capacity planning, scalability, reliability engineering.
• Excellent communication skills: able to work with technical and non‑technical stakeholders, present architecture decisions, write technical documentation.

• Certifications such as AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Microsoft Azure Solutions Architect, Google Cloud Professional Architect, Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP), etc.
• Prior experience working on federal or DHS / USCIS contracts, or in regulated environments.
• Familiarity with Zero Trust architectures and strategy.
• Experience with platform monitoring, telemetry, observability tools.
• Experie…