Director, Solutions Architecture & Sales Engineering

Aleut Federal•Colorado Springs, VA

20h•$190,000 - $260,000

About The Position

Aleut Federal is seeking a Director of Solutions Architecture & Sales Engineering to lead the technical function that wins and validates our federal work. This is a player-coach role. You will own the team, its operating model, and its resource strategy — and you will still be the architect in the room on our most consequential pursuits, hands on the keyboard, building the reference architecture and the prototype yourself. The team spans the full spectrum of federal solutions architecture: cloud and infrastructure modernization, data platforms and analytics, cybersecurity and Zero Trust, application and platform engineering, and enterprise IT services. AI and agentic systems are the anchor discriminator — the capability that differentiates Aleut Federal in the market — and this leader is expected to carry that depth personally, not delegate it. The role operates across the full lifecycle: opportunity shaping and technical solutioning, through capture, proposal development, and pricing, into post-award delivery assurance. You will directly influence technical win strategies while remaining accountable for whether what we sold can actually be built. This is a build, sell, validate, and lead role. If you want to stop building, this is the wrong seat. If you only want to build, this is also the wrong seat.

Requirements

U.S. Citizenship (U.S. Citizens only).
10+ years of U.S. federal technology experience with a Bachelor's degree, including 3+ years leading technical teams (direct management or formal team lead with performance accountability).
Demonstrated hands-on experience designing and implementing production or production-grade systems — this is a technical leadership role, not a management-only role.
Demonstrated hands-on experience with one or more of: LLM applications, RAG architectures, agentic systems, or AI-enabled workflow automation.
Breadth across enterprise solutions architecture — cloud, data, security/Zero Trust, and application or platform engineering.
Experience owning technical solutioning, capture, proposal development, and customer-facing technical engagements in the federal market.
Experience managing resource allocation and competing priorities across concurrent pursuits or programs.
Ability to obtain a Position of Public Trust.

Nice To Haves

Experience building or scaling a solutions architecture or sales engineering function in a federal services or GovCon environment.
Experience delivering AI systems in production federal or enterprise environments.
Experience implementing agentic workflows with tool use, orchestration, and human oversight.
Experience with secure AI deployment, monitoring, and governance; FedRAMP and ATO pathway familiarity.
Experience with IDIQ, GWAC, and task-order capture at scale.
Experience with OEM/ISV partner and alliance strategy.
Active Top Secret clearance.
AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional or AWS Certified Machine Learning – Specialty
Microsoft Azure Solutions Architect Expert or Azure AI Engineer Associate
Google Professional Cloud Architect or Professional Machine Learning Engineer
CISSP or comparable security certification
Relevant cloud, data, or MLOps certifications aligned to implementation depth

Responsibilities

Lead, manage, and develop a team of 3–6 solution architects and sales engineers — setting technical standards, career paths, and performance expectations.
Establish the operating model for the function: how pursuits are intaken and triaged, how architects are assigned, what artifacts are produced at each gate, and how quality is reviewed before anything reaches a customer or a proposal.
Coach the team in customer-facing technical delivery — architecture sessions, demos, whiteboarding, and executive briefings — and raise the bar on how the team communicates technical value.
Build and defend the hiring plan: identify capability gaps, define labor categories and skill profiles, and recruit against them.
Serve as the technical escalation point for the team; unblock hard architecture and feasibility questions rather than routing them elsewhere.
Own resource allocation across a portfolio of concurrent pursuits — decide where architect capacity goes, and make the tradeoff calls when demand exceeds supply.
Forecast technical solutioning demand against the BD pipeline and align capacity to the pursuits that carry the highest expected value, not the loudest internal request.
Build the utilization and prioritization framework: bid/no-bid technical inputs, level-of-effort estimation for solutioning work, and clear criteria for when the team engages versus declines.
Manage matrixed and partner capacity — pull delivery SMEs, OEM/ISV resources, and teaming partner architects onto pursuits when the internal team is the wrong or insufficient answer.
Track and report the function's contribution: pursuits supported, technical win rate, cost of solutioning, and where capacity constraints are costing the company opportunities.
Develop and maintain Aleut Federal's technical solution strategy — which capabilities we invest in, which we partner for, and which we decline, mapped against agency demand signals and our competitive position.
Build and own the reusable asset portfolio: reference architectures, solution patterns, demo environments, prototypes, and accelerators that shorten pursuit cycles and improve consistency.
Define and maintain the technology partner and OEM strategy in coordination with BD and delivery leadership — cloud providers, AI/ML platforms, data and security vendors.
Advise executive leadership on emerging technology direction, investment priorities, IR&D focus, and the capability roadmap needed to compete on target IDIQs and recompetes.
Translate strategy into practice: make sure the standards, patterns, and partner positions actually show up in the proposals and the delivered work.
Personally lead technical solutioning on the highest-value and highest-complexity pursuits — including AI-based opportunities spanning generative AI and LLM-enabled applications, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), agentic workflows, AI-enabled automation, and decision support systems.
Define technical discriminators and win themes, lead customer-facing technical discussions, and translate capability into measurable mission, operational, and economic outcomes.
Partner with Business Development and Capture to shape opportunities pre-RFP and strengthen competitive positioning.
Present and defend solution approaches to technical, mission, and executive stakeholders — including in orals.
Deep practical experience with agentic systems is required: multi-step reasoning and task orchestration, tool-using agents that interact with APIs, enterprise systems, retrieval layers, workflow engines, and external services, and human-in-the-loop execution models.
Design and implement systems with guardrails, fallback logic, validation layers, escalation controls, memory and context handling, and clear tradeoff decisions between prompting, retrieval workflows, deterministic orchestration, and true agentic execution.
Ensure AI systems are secure, governable, auditable, and aligned to Zero Trust, federal security expectations, privacy constraints, responsible AI practices, hallucination mitigation, and output validation requirements.
Set the standard for the team: define what “good” looks like for AI architecture at Aleut Federal and hold the team's work to it.
Own the technical solution across the proposal portfolio — assign section authors, review for compliance and persuasiveness, and personally author the anchor technical sections on priority bids.
Author complete technical sections including solution architecture, AI/model and retrieval strategy, agentic workflow design, security and governance model, and implementation approach.
Build and review BOEs aligned to engineering effort, data preparation and integration, infrastructure and model access cost, transition, and sustainment.
Serve as the technical voice in pricing and price-to-win discussions — ensure the proposed solution is executable at the proposed price.
Ensure solutions are compliant, executable, secure, and clearly differentiated.
Ensure alignment between proposed architectures and delivered implementations across the portfolio; own the handoff from capture to delivery.
Provide technical oversight during prototype-to-production transition, data integration, retrieval setup, model integration, and workflow deployment.
Identify and mitigate risks related to hallucinations, output reliability, data leakage, access control, workflow instability, latency, cost, governance gaps, and auditability.
Feed delivery lessons back into the reference architectures and BOE assumptions so the next bid is better than the last.
Develop solution briefs, use cases, and capability messaging across the portfolio, with AI as the leading edge.
Represent Aleut Federal at industry events, executive discussions, customer briefings, demos, and technical forums — and speak credibly on agentic systems, production AI architecture, and responsible AI in federal environments.
Develop the team as visible technical voices in the market, not just internal resources.
Position Aleut Federal as a credible delivery partner — not just an advisory brand.