Program Description: NOTE: This is a short-term position with an expected duration of April 1, 2026 - September 30th, 2026. This program provides IT services focused on building, securing, and operating the Department of Veteran Affairs LGY’s home loan product-line technology. The contract’s purpose is to modernize and sustain critical home loan technology systems that support LGY’s delivery of mortgage-related services to program stakeholders, to provide continuous delivery and security integration.

Position Description: We are seeking a System Architect to join an expanded analytics requirements, solutioning, and development team supporting VA. In this role, you will provide architecture leadership and hands-on guidance across AWS and VAEC for analytics platforms, ensuring solutions are scalable, secure, cost-effective, and aligned to mission needs. You will architect and design data pipelines and analytics workloads using EMR/Spark, AWS Glue, and Amazon Redshift, with a strong focus on data modeling, performance tuning, and operational excellence.

You will work closely with technical and business stakeholders to identify gaps in client systems, translate strategy into technical requirements, evaluate solution options (including cost/benefit), and communicate implementation plans in a clear and accessible way. You will also help ensure solutions meet applicable industry and regulatory specifications, provide timely customer feedback to production teams, and build trusted relationships with clients and internal teams.

Responsibilities:

Architecture & Technical Leadership

• Provide AWS and VAEC architecture leadership for an analytics team supporting VA LGY initiatives.
• Define end-to-end reference architectures, design patterns, and engineering standards for analytics solutions.
• Lead architecture reviews, ensuring solutions meet security, compliance, scalability, resiliency, and performance requirements.

Data Platform & Pipeline Design

• Architect and design data ingestion and transformation pipelines using EMR/Spark, AWS Glue, and related AWS services.
• Design and optimize Amazon Redshift architectures, including cluster sizing, distribution/sort keys, workload management, and query tuning.
• Create and maintain data models (conceptual/logical/physical) aligned to analytics and reporting use cases.

Performance Tuning & Reliability

• Tune Spark jobs and pipeline performance (e.g., partitioning strategy, executor sizing, shuffle optimization).
• Improve Redshift performance through schema design, query optimization, compression, and vacuum/analyze strategies.
• Establish monitoring, alerting, and runbooks for production operations; drive root-cause analysis and continuous improvement.

Client Advisory & Solutioning

• Identify gaps or problems in client systems and assess technical needs against business strategy.
• Develop solution options, including trade-off analysis and cost implications (e.g., compute/storage choices, workload patterns).
• Produce plans and diagrams showing how solutions will work and present them in an understandable way to technical and non-technical audiences.

Governance, Security & Compliance

• Ensure architecture aligns with required industry regulations and security standards (e.g., data handling, access controls, auditing).
• Partner with security and governance stakeholders to implement data protection, least privilege, and data lifecycle management practices.

Collaboration & Stakeholder Management

• Provide coaching and technical direction to team members; elevate engineering practices through standards and code/design reviews.
• Maintain ongoing relationships with clients and internal partners; provide timely feedback to production teams to improve delivery outcomes.