Lead Cloud Architect

Peraton is seeking a Lead Cloud Architect to join a team responsible for the operational reliability and architecture of production systems running in AWS Commercial and AWS GovCloud environments. Some system components are also deployed in Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). The primary production workload runs on Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA).

This is a hands-on technical leadership role that combines cloud architecture, software engineering practices, and systems operations. The Lead Cloud Architect will design and implement scalable, secure, and reliable cloud solutions; define and monitor SLIs and SLOs; support application deployments and migrations across staging and production environments; and create and manage CI/CD pipelines. They will also lead incident response, drive automation to reduce operational toil, establish and promote cloud engineering best practices, and mentor junior Cloud Engineers.

This person partners closely with platform engineers, the security team, and application developers to ensure the infrastructure services are reliable, available, and deployed in a way that meets both developer and security requirements.

Location: Remote

Shift Schedule: 8am – 5pm Eastern Standard Time (EST)

What you will do:

• Own the reliability, availability, performance, and operational health of critical infrastructure services and applications, driving continuous improvement throughout their lifecycle.
• Lead complex production incidents and service recovery efforts, providing technical direction during high-impact events and driving thorough root-cause analysis and corrective actions.
• Define and continuously improve reliability objectives, including SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, service health metrics, and operational standards for infrastructure services and applications.
• Lead observability strategy in partnership with application teams, defining meaningful metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, and alerts and ensuring they are integrated into the organization's observability capabilities.
• Lead the operational lifecycle of deployed services, including releases, upgrades, patching, configuration changes, capacity management, maintenance, and technology refreshes.
• Identify and drive the resolution of systemic reliability risks, recurring failure modes, capacity constraints, technical debt, and other sources of operational risk.
• Design and lead resilience and recovery initiatives, including failure-mode analysis, performance and capacity testing, disaster recovery, backup and failover strategies, and recovery validation.
• Develop and advance automation and everything-as-code practices to improve consistency, reliability, deployment, recovery, and overall operational efficiency.
• Partner with Platform Engineering and application teams on architecture and design, defining operational and reliability requirements and influencing platform capabilities and application architectures.
• Mentor junior Cloud Architects and provide technical leadership by establishing best practices, improving operational processes, and advancing the organization's overall reliability engineering maturity.
  

Basic Qualifications:

• Must be a U.S. Citizen with the ability to obtain and maintain the required Public Trust level clearance.
• Bachelor's Degree and 12 years of experience, or Master's and 10 years of experience, or a High School diploma/equivalent and 16 years of experience.
• 7+ years hands-on experience in cloud engineering, DevOps, or production systems engineering.
• Extensive hands-on experience operating in AWS Commercial and AWS GovCloud, including OpenShift (ROSA) or comparable Kubernetes-based platforms
• Deep infrastructure-as-code experience with Terraform and Ansible / Ansible Tower.
• Advanced proficiency of GitLab and Jenkins CI/CD platforms, including reliability gating and deployment automation.
• Deep experience in Linux and Windows Server administration
• Substantial practical experience of implementing and managing enterprise observability tools such as Dynatrace, Datadog, Splunk and Open Telemetry.
• Ownership of an SLI/SLO and alerting program, including error budgets, alert rationalization, and noise reduction.
• Extensive scripting/automation proficiency in Python, Bash, PowerShell, or Go.
• Experience operating in federal or regulated environments (FISMA, FedRAMP, NIST 800-53).

Preferred Qualifications:

• AWS Solutions Architect, AWS DevOps Engineer, or AWS SysOps certification.
• Red Hat Certified Specialist in ROSA, Red Hat Certified Advanced System Administrator in OpenShift
• Azure Solutions Architect Expert, Azure DevOps Engineer Expert, GCP Professional Cloud Architect, or GCP Professional Cloud Developer certification
• Dynatrace Associate, Datadog Log Management Fundamentals certification
• GitLab CI/CD Associate certification, Certified Jenkins Engineer (CJE)
• Terraform Authoring and Operations Professional certification