Principal Data Architect, DoD of Space Systems

RS21•Albuquerque, NM

4d•$165,000 - $190,000

About The Position

The Principal Data Architect, DoD of Space Systems is responsible for owning and evolving the end-to-end technical architecture of the Space deployment of Prequip, spanning software systems, infrastructure, and machine learning capabilities. This role serves as the technical authority for ensuring the platform can be deployed, operated, and sustained in mission-critical environments with strict security, reliability, and operational constraints. This role focuses on designing and operating systems that must function continuously in constrained, regulated, and often air-gapped environments with little to no connectivity exists, where uptime, observability, and explainability are essential. The Principal Data Architect ensures that Prequip Space meets real world ops-floor requirements, including low latency, fault tolerance, secure deployment, and maintainability, while remaining aligned with the broader Prequip platform and its evolution across other domains such as Energy. As a senior member of RS21’s technical staff, this role blends strategic technical leadership with hands-on engineering. The Principal Data Architect works closely with software engineers, platform teams, data scientists, and operational stakeholders to guide architectural decisions, contribute directly to production code, and ensure that machine learning systems behave predictably and transparently in live operational settings. This role plays a critical part in balancing innovation with operational discipline, ensuring that technical decisions support both immediate mission needs and long-term platform scalability. This role is expected to contribute directly to production code and infrastructure implementation, not solely architectural oversight. RS21’s Prequip-Space platform, originally developed under AFRL’s Hyperspace Challenge, delivers real-time anomaly detection for satellite telemetry. We are expanding this capability into operational mission environments and seeking leaders who can deploy and sustain it under real-world constraints.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience in computer science, engineering, or related technical field.
7+ years of experience in data architecture, data engineering, or a closely related discipline, with at least 3 years in a lead or architect capacity.
Active clearance is required. Must be eligible for SCI.
Principal-level experience building and operating production-grade software systems.
Strong background in infrastructure and platform engineering, particularly containerized and Kubernetes-based deployments.
Demonstrated expertise designing and implementing solutions on AWS.
Solid understanding of machine learning systems, including time-series data, telemetry, and model deployment considerations.
Experience designing systems for high reliability, security, and operational continuity.
Ability to reason holistically across software architecture, infrastructure, and data science.
Strong problem solving, architectural reasoning, and technical leadership skills.

Nice To Haves

Experience working with satellite telemetry, mission systems, or space-related operational data.
Active Top Secret Security Clearance.
Prior experience deploying and operating software in classified, disconnected, air-gapped, or highly low-connectivity environments.
AWS certification with experience delivering solutions in AWS GovCloud or other compliance-bound environments.
Familiarity with ops-floor requirements such as low latency, fault tolerance, and explainability.
Experience supporting accreditation, compliance, or security hardening processes.
Background in MLOps, model lifecycle management, and production ML observability.

Responsibilities

Define and own the end-to-end technical architecture for Prequip Space deployments, ensuring alignment across software services, infrastructure, and machine learning systems.
Establish architectural standards and technical guardrails that support reliability, security, and long-term maintainability in mission-critical environments.
Evaluate and evolve existing system designs as Prequip Space scales and matures, balancing near term operational needs with long-term platform strategy.
Ensure architectural alignment between Prequip Space and the broader Prequip platform, enabling shared capabilities while respecting domain specific constraints.
Design and deploy infrastructure across constrained and regulated environments, including on-prem, sandboxed, and limited or no-internet deployments.
Lead Kubernetes-based application hosting, deployment, and operational strategies, including cluster configuration, upgrades, and lifecycle management.
Ensure infrastructure designs meet ops-floor expectations for availability, fault tolerance, performance, and security.
Partner with security and platform teams to support accreditation, hardening, and compliance requirements.
Promote infrastructure-as-code, automation, and repeatable deployment patterns where feasible.
Own and evolve the shared ML and MLOps pipeline used across Prequip for Space and Prequip for Energy.
Oversee the design, deployment, and ongoing operation of anomaly detection and event prediction models that analyze time‑series telemetry.
Ensure ML systems are explainable, observable, and appropriate for real-time operational decision-making.
Collaborate with data science teams to understand model behavior, data quality issues, and performance degradation in live environments.
Support model lifecycle management, including versioning, retraining, and validation in constrained deployments.
Contribute directly to production code across APIs, data pipelines, deployment tooling, and ML integration layers.
Ensure code quality, testability, and maintainability across shared and space-specific components.
Provide technical guidance and mentorship to engineers working across the Prequip code base.
Review and influence design and implementation decisions to ensure consistency with architectural standards.
Design and implement observability strategies that enable real-time monitoring, debugging, and performance analysis in ops-floor environments.
Ensure systems support effective incident response, root cause analysis, and continuous improvement.
Partner with operations stakeholders to align system behavior with real-world workflows and expectations.
Drive improvements in system reliability, resilience, and operational readiness through proactive design and testing.
Serve as the primary technical authority for Prequip Space across engineering, platform, data science, and leadership teams.
Collaborate closely with Technical Program Managers and Project Managers to align architecture with delivery plans and deployment timelines.
Communicate complex technical concepts clearly to non-technical stakeholders, including leadership and operational partners.
Support technical decision-making by balancing innovation, feasibility, security, and operational impact.