Systems Architect

Travel Required: Up to 10%. Ability to obtain Public Trust clearance required; candidates with an active Public Trust or suitability are preferred.

About the Role

As a System Architect, you will lead the technical architecture, modernization, and continuous improvement of the Grants.gov platform and related solutions supporting federal grant-making operations. You will collaborate with federal stakeholders, product teams, engineers, security specialists, and operations personnel to design scalable, secure, and highly available solutions that support mission-critical services for millions of users across the federal grants ecosystem. You will provide architectural leadership for system enhancements, platform modernization, cloud-based services, integrations, security compliance, and operational excellence while supporting the consolidation objectives between Grants.gov and GrantSolutions.

Responsibilities

• Lead the development and maintenance of enterprise, solution, application, integration, and platform architectures supporting Grants.gov and related services.
• Design scalable, highly available, secure, and resilient application and infrastructure solutions that support continuous operations and disaster recovery requirements.
• Define architecture roadmaps, modernization strategies, and technical recommendations that improve system performance, availability, maintainability, and cost efficiency.
• Collaborate with development, operations, security, and cloud teams to ensure architectural alignment across platforms, applications, databases, integrations, and hosting environments.
• Evaluate and recommend emerging technologies, automation capabilities, cloud services, AI-enabled solutions, and operational improvements.
• Provide technical oversight for system-to-system integrations, APIs, data exchanges, forms processing, and application workflows.
• Support architecture governance processes, solution reviews, technical documentation, and compliance with federal architecture standards and HHS Enterprise Performance Life Cycle (EPLC) requirements.
• Participate in incident investigations, root cause analyses, capacity planning, performance optimization, and technology risk assessments.
• Support cybersecurity and privacy initiatives, including Authority to Operate (ATO) activities, security documentation, POA&M management, incident response, and compliance requirements.
• Present technical concepts, architecture recommendations, alternatives, and modernization plans to executive, business, and technical stakeholders.
• Develop architecture artifacts, technical management plans, system documentation, and executive-ready presentations that support operational and strategic decision-making.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree. Additional four years of experience needed in lieu of degree.
• Eight to ten or more years of experience designing, developing, and supporting enterprise-scale application architectures.
• Experience architecting cloud-hosted solutions, preferably within AWS environments.
• Experience with enterprise application integration, APIs, web services, and service-oriented or microservices architectures.
• Experience designing highly available, secure, and scalable systems supporting public-facing applications.
• Knowledge of application lifecycle management, DevSecOps practices, CI/CD pipelines, configuration management, and release management.
• Experience supporting federal IT systems and compliance frameworks.
• Strong understanding of:
  • Application architecture and design patterns
  • Database architecture and performance optimization
  • Security architecture and risk management
  • Disaster recovery and business continuity planning
  • Performance and capacity management
  • Identity and access management
• Experience developing technical documentation, architecture diagrams, operational procedures, and executive briefings.
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to explain complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Must be able to obtain and maintain a Federal or DoD Public Trust.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience supporting federal grants management systems, shared service platforms, or large public-facing government applications.
• Experience with Grants.gov.
• Experience with HHS, ACF, CMS, HRSA, NIH, or other federal grant-making agencies.
• Knowledge of HHS Enterprise Performance Life Cycle (EPLC), federal IT governance, ATO processes, security assessment activities, and compliance-driven delivery environments.
• Experience with Grants.gov-like capabilities, including public-facing web applications, applicant submissions, grantor user management, S2S integrations, forms processing, chatbot support, helpdesk escalations, or system status communications.
• Experience supporting cloud-hosted applications, AWS environments, application platform security, certificate management, account management, logging, monitoring, backup validation, or disaster recovery planning.
• Experience supporting modernization, consolidation, transition-in, or multi-vendor integration initiatives involving multiple applications and stakeholder organizations.
• Relevant certifications or credentials such as:
  • AWS Solutions Architect Professional
  • TOGAF
  • CISSP
  • Certified Federal Enterprise Architect (CFEA)
  • SAFe Architect or equivalent Agile architecture certification

Pay

The annual salary range for this position is $130,000.00 - $216,000.00. Compensation decisions depend on a wide range of factors, including but not limited to skill sets, experience and training, security clearances, licensure and certifications, and other business and organizational needs.

Benefits

• Medical, Rx, Dental & Vision Insurance
• Personal and Family Sick Time & Company Paid Holidays
• Parental Leave
• 401(k) Retirement Plan
• Group Term Life and Travel Assistance
• Voluntary Life and AD&D Insurance
• Health Savings Account, Health Care & Dependent Care Flexible Spending Accounts
• Transit and Parking Commuter Benefits
• Short-Term & Long-Term Disability
• Tuition Reimbursement, Personal Development, Certifications & Learning Opportunities
• Employee Referral Program
• Corporate Sponsored Events & Community Outreach
• Care.com annual membership
• Employee Assistance Program
• Supplemental Benefits via Corestream (Critical Care, Hospital Indemnity, Accident Insurance, Legal Assistance and ID theft protection, etc.)
• Position may be eligible for a discretionary variable incentive bonus