Senior Systems Architect

Join us in building high-impact, mission-critical architecture on the Chinook Program, supporting an Intelligence Community customer. Design and deliver accurate, meaningful, and insightful architecture and design products at the intersection of process improvement, agile development, and IT strategy. Work alongside software engineers, systems engineers, product owners, testers, and mission stakeholders to transform challenging operational requirements into viable design artifacts in a collaborative Agile environment.

About the role

As a Sr. Systems Architect, you will play a critical role in analyzing and maturing IT architecture baselines, developing and governing detailed architecture documentation, and ensuring traceability between artifacts, mission requirements, and deployed solutions. You will collaborate with cross-functional teams, identify design gaps and security risks, lead technical reviews, and mentor downstream development and engineering teams.

Responsibilities

• Analyze and mature existing IT architecture baselines into comprehensive, accurate, and scalable design models.
• Develop, maintain, and govern detailed IT architecture documentation across system, data, and security domains.
• Establish and maintain strict traceability between architectural artifacts, mission requirements, and deployed solutions.
• Utilize industry-standard architecture development tools to generate and manage structural blueprints and diagrams.
• Integrate architectural planning, review, and execution.
• Collaborate with cross-functional contract teams to ensure the architecture aligns with overarching mission objectives.
• Identify design gaps, technical debt, or security risks in current systems and architect viable mitigation strategies.
• Lead technical reviews and present complex architectural concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Ensure all IT designs adhere to Enterprise Architecture standards and Intelligence Community (IC) directives.
• Provide technical mentorship and architectural guidance to downstream development and engineering teams.
• Drive continuous improvement in documentation standards and architecture modeling practices across the contract.

Requirements

• U.S. citizenship is required per contract.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Systems Engineering, or related technical discipline and 8-12 years of prior relevant experience or equivalent experience.
• Active Top Secret/SCI with the ability to successfully pass a Polygraph examination.
• Demonstrated experience designing and implementing complex, enterprise-scale systems and solutions.
• Proven ability to create, map, and manage complex traceability matrices between design artifacts and requirements.
• Experience with advanced architecture development and modeling tools (e.g., Sparx EA, Cameo, MagicDraw).
• Prior experience working on contract teams supporting the Intelligence (Intel) industry or DoD environments.
• Solid foundational understanding of standard enterprise architecture frameworks (e.g., DoDAF, TOGAF).
• Excellent technical writing and verbal communication skills tailored to producing meaningful design documentation.
• Strong analytical capabilities necessary to deconstruct, interpret, and refine legacy architectural designs.

Preferred Qualifications

• Master’s degree with 6-10 years of prior relevant experience.
• Active professional certifications (e.g., TOGAF 9 Certified, Certified Systems Engineering Professional - CSEP).
• Demonstrated experience operating effectively within a Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) environment.
• Experience designing or documenting cloud-native architectures (AWS/C2S, Azure) within classified environments.
• Familiarity with DevSecOps practices and integrating architecture compliance checks into CI/CD pipelines.
• Advanced expertise in Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) methodologies and practical application.
• Previous experience serving as a Lead IT Architect on a large-scale government or Intel contract.
• Deep understanding of data flow modeling, data governance, and cross-domain solution architectures.

Locations

This position may be performed in the following locations (Gaithersburg, MD is the program’s primary work location):

• Gaithersburg, MD
• Alexandria, VA
• Chantilly, VA
• Englewood, CO
• St. Louis, MO
• Tucson, AZ

Pay

Pay Range: $107,900.00 - $195,050.00. The Leidos pay range for this job level is a general guideline only and not a guarantee of compensation or salary. Additional factors considered in extending an offer include (but are not limited to) responsibilities of the job, education, experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities, as well as internal equity, alignment with market data, applicable bargaining agreement (if any), or other law.

Benefits

Pay and benefits are fundamental to any career decision. Leidos offers competitive compensation, Health and Wellness programs, Income Protection, Paid Leave, and Retirement. More details are available at www.leidos.com/careers/pay-benefits.