Systems Architect

NT Concepts seeks a System Architect to support a mission-focused research, development, and engineering program. This individual will shape the technical direction of an evolving capability that combines software engineering, data exploitation, and applied artificial intelligence.

The System Architect will work directly with mission stakeholders, product leadership, and engineering teams to translate operational challenges into practical system capabilities. The ideal candidate understands the mission environment and can lead architecture decisions from early concept development through prototyping, integration, and operational deployment.

The successful candidate must understand how software applications, data platforms, analytics, and AI-enabled services work together as an integrated mission system.

Clearance: Active TS/SCI clearance. US Citizenship is required.

Location:Chantilly and Tysons, VA (4 days a week on‑site)

Desired Leadership Profile:

The successful candidate will operate as a technical integrator and architectural leader rather than a narrowly focused specialist. This person should be equally comfortable discussing mission workflows with an operator, system interfaces with a software engineer, and data and AI/ML model performance with a data scientist.

We are looking for an architect who can bring structure and technical direction to an evolving problem while preserving the flexibility required for research and rapid prototyping. The candidate must balance technical ambition with the practical demands of security, deployment, sustainment, and mission adoption, while communicating tradeoffs effectively to both technical teams and mission stakeholders.

Responsibilities:

• Own and communicate the technical vision and systems architecture for mission capabilities throughout the solution lifecycle, from concepts through deployment and sustainment.
• Engage mission users and stakeholders to understand operational needs, workflows, constraints, and desired outcomes.
• Translate mission needs into system concepts, architecture decisions, and technical requirements.
• Define, document and maintain system architecture across applications, data services, integration components, and AI/ML enabled capabilities.
• Guide the evolution of prototypes into secure, scalable, and supportable operational solutions.
• Establish architectural patterns that enable modular development, rapid integration, and future capability growth.
• Evaluate technical alternatives and communicate tradeoffs involving mission value, performance, security, cost, schedule and maintainability.
• Partner with software engineers to define application boundaries, service interactions, APIs, and deployment patterns.
• Define and develop approaches for ingesting, organizing, enriching, exploiting structured and unstructured data.
• Collaborate with data scientists and AI/ML engineers to incorporate models into mission workflows.
• Define technical approaches for model integration, evaluation, monitoring, and human oversight.
• Guide the development of data pipelines that support analytics, machine learning, and operational decision-making.
• Lead architecture reviews and contribute to technical planning across multidisciplinary engineering teams.
• Identify architectural, technical and integration risks early and develop practical mitigation strategies.
• Maintain architecture artifacts, interface definitions, decision records, requirements traceability and technical roadmaps.
• Support demonstrations, technical exchanges, and design review and architectural discussions with Government stakeholders.
• Mentor engineers and promote sound architecture, software, data, security and systems engineering practices across the programs.

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree…