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Akima · 1 day ago

Platform Architect - Remote

United States

Full-time

Remote

Senior Level, Lead/Staff

$100K/yr - $130K/yr

10+ years exp

Akima is a company focused on delivering federal lifecycle solutions and supporting shareholder communities in Alaska. They are seeking a Platform Architect SME to provide technical leadership and architectural oversight for enterprise platforms across USCIS, ensuring solutions align with enterprise goals and compliance requirements.

ConstructionConsultingCyber SecurityInformation TechnologyLogisticsManagement ConsultingSupply Chain ManagementTechnical Support

No H1B

Security Clearance Required

U.S. Citizen Only

Responsibilities

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

Qualification

Platform architectureMulti-cloud deploymentsSecurity complianceAutomationIaCPerformance tuningContainer orchestrationDevOps practicesCommunicationMentoring skillsCollaboration skills

Required

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, OpenShift, etc.), serverless, microservices, middleware, networking for platforms

Proficiency in automation, IaC (Terraform, CloudFormation, 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

Preferred

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

Experience with modern DevOps / DevSecOps practices

Experience with emerging tech relevant to USCIS modernization: AI/ML platform integration, edge computing, etc