Principal Cloud Platform Architect

Leidos•Gaithersburg, MD

21h•Hybrid

About The Position

Leidos is seeking a Principal Cloud & Platform Architect to join the Air Traffic Business Area within the Homeland Sector, supporting the development of the Leidos Common Automation Platform (L-CAP). L-CAP is a mission-critical, future-ready automation platform built on a hybrid cloud data mesh architecture, enabling next-generation air traffic management capabilities. You will serve as the enterprise platform architect responsible for designing the hybrid cloud infrastructure and platform services that underpin the L-CAP automation platform. We are building with an AI-first engineering mindset, embracing emerging AI capabilities and modern development practices to accelerate delivery, improve software quality, and continuously evolve how we design and build mission-critical systems. This position supports government programs and requires the ability to obtain and maintain a favorable Public Trust investigation.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree with 12+ years of cloud and platform engineering experience
Expert-level cloud architecture experience with AWS or Azure GovCloud
Production Kubernetes experience at scale (100+ nodes)
Deep Terraform/IaC expertise for enterprise infrastructure management
Platform engineering leadership for large development organizations
FedRAMP platform compliance and boundary design experience
Container orchestration and microservices platform design
Distributed systems architecture and reliability engineering
Microservices platform design supporting hundreds of services
Ability to obtain and maintain a Public Trust clearance; US citizenship
Subject to government background investigation
Experience supporting deterministic distributed services with strict latency and availability requirements
Knowledge of platform engineering for safety-critical applications versus general enterprise workloads
Ability to obtain and maintain a Public Trust
U.S. citizenship required
Successful completion of background investigations as required by the government customer

Nice To Haves

AWS Solutions Architect Professional or Azure Solutions Architect Expert certification
GovCloud deployment and operations experience
Air-gapped and disconnected environment architecture
Platform-as-a-Service design for internal developer teams
SRE and reliability engineering practices
Helm, ArgoCD, and GitOps deployment patterns
Service mesh implementation (Istio, Linkerd)
Experience with hybrid cloud deployment of real-time operational systems in aviation or similar safety-critical domains

Responsibilities

Design the hybrid cloud architecture spanning on-premises and cloud environments
Define Kubernetes orchestration strategy for containerized workloads at scale
Establish Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) governance using Terraform
Architect FedRAMP-compliant platform designs across multiple environments
Design and govern CI/CD platform services for engineering teams
Lead capacity planning and infrastructure cost modeling
Define platform reliability standards including SLOs and SLIs
Design multi-environment deployment strategy (dev, test, staging, production)
Oversee container orchestration patterns and service mesh architecture
Drive cloud cost optimization and FinOps practices
Design platform architecture to host safety-critical ATC applications with deterministic performance characteristics rather than general enterprise IT workloads
Ensure operational resilience and failover capabilities for distributed real-time ATC services across hybrid cloud deployments
Define platform requirements for deterministic distributed services including latency guarantees and predictable resource allocation
Champion an AI-first engineering culture by identifying and applying AI-assisted development capabilities, automation, and emerging software engineering practices that improve developer productivity, code quality, testing, and delivery.