Senior Program Manager-Solutions Architect

Dcode•Washington, DC

4d•Onsite

About The Position

Dcode is seeking a technical systems architect to work in complex and restricted mission environments. The role involves evaluating existing systems and mission requirements to create organized architectural structures, leading government and engineering stakeholders through the process of designing and deploying functional technology. The architect will collaborate with government clients, operators, program leaders, engineers, security teams, vendors, and Dcode teams to translate complex mission requirements into secure, scalable, and build-ready system architectures. This is a hands-on role focused on architectural tasks, including assessing current systems and constraints, defining future architectures, and developing technical requirements and integration strategies. The position requires evaluating tradeoffs and supporting teams from initial concepts to final implementation, with a focus on designing solutions that account for legacy systems, security requirements, established acquisition processes, organizational ownership, long-term sustainment, and government deployment/management capacity. This role is based in Washington, DC.

Requirements

Extensive experience with the design and implementation of complex system architectures within government, national security, or other mission environments that are highly regulated.
Ability to take ambiguous operational or business problems and turn them into coherent technical architectures.
Experience designing systems involving multiple applications, platforms, networks, data sources, interfaces, or infrastructure environments.
Experience developing technical requirements and architecture artifacts that engineers could actually implement.
Experience working across architecture, engineering, cybersecurity, infrastructure, software, data, and operational teams.
Experience making and defending difficult architecture tradeoffs rather than simply documenting ideal-state designs.
Experience leading technical efforts involving multiple stakeholders, organizations, vendors, or engineering disciplines.
Effective communication skills with both deeply technical teams and senior decision-makers.
Experience working successfully in environments where security, compliance, legacy technology, organizational boundaries, and operational constraints materially affect the solution.

Nice To Haves

Extensive experience in national security systems: Department of Defense, Intelligence Community, command and control, communications, networking, or other classified mission environments.
Extensive experience in systems engineering and architecture: DoDAF, MBSE/SysML, digital engineering, operational and system views, interface control documents, requirements traceability, or similar practices.
Extensive experience in modern infrastructure: Cloud-native and hybrid architectures, edge computing, APIs, microservices, Zero Trust, identity and access management, DevSecOps, or data platforms.
Extensive experience in AI-enabled systems: LLMs, agents, RAG, AI orchestration, MCP or similar interoperability patterns, and secure integration of AI capabilities with enterprise systems.
Extensive experience in technology transition: Evaluating and integrating commercial or emerging technologies, prototypes, pilots, and rapid acquisition efforts into operational government environments.
Certifications like INCOSE, TOGAF, AWS/Azure, CISSP, SAFe, and PMP.

Responsibilities

Architect Mission-Critical Systems: Assess existing network systems, infrastructure, interfaces, dependencies, technical debt, security boundaries, and operational constraints.
Translate mission needs and operational concepts into clear current-state and future-state architectures.
Develop conceptual, logical, physical, integration, and deployment architectures appropriate to the problem.
Decompose complex mission needs into capabilities, system components, services, interfaces, requirements, and executable technical work.
Evaluate architectural alternatives and make decision-ready recommendations across performance, resiliency, interoperability, security, scalability, cost, and schedule.
Create modernization roadmaps that connect long-term architectural direction with practical near-term delivery.
Turn Architecture Into Something Teams Can Build: Develop clear, testable technical and non-functional requirements from operational needs and mission outcomes.
Define system boundaries, interfaces, integration patterns, data flows, APIs, services, and external dependencies.
Maintain traceability between mission needs, requirements, architecture decisions, implementation activities, and verification objectives.
Identify technical risks, assumptions, constraints, and dependencies early enough to do something about them.
Support integration, test, verification, validation, and operational acceptance by ensuring architecture and requirements are implementation-ready.
Design for the Real Environment: Develop integration strategies spanning legacy systems, modern applications, cloud and edge environments, networks, data platforms, and commercial technologies.
Incorporate cybersecurity, identity and access management, data protection, network segmentation, resiliency, and classified-environment constraints from the beginning.
Design for implementation rather than architectural purity, accounting for authorization, acquisition, licensing, portability, sustainment, government ownership, and operational realities.
Help transition prototypes and commercial technologies into government-owned and operated environments without creating avoidable long-term dependencies.
Evaluate AI-enabled architectures, including secure integration of models and agents with enterprise systems, data sources, APIs, tools, and mission workflows.
Lead Through Ambiguity: Serve as a trusted technical advisor to government leaders, operators, program offices, engineers, and Dcode teams.
Facilitate architecture working groups, requirements workshops, technical reviews, design sessions, and engineering trade studies.
Lead technical workstreams across multidisciplinary teams and organizational boundaries.
Translate complex technical decisions into clear architecture views, roadmaps, executive briefings, and decision papers.
Challenge assumptions constructively and drive stakeholders toward decisions when requirements, ownership, interfaces, or constraints are unclear.
Help Dcode develop repeatable architecture, requirements, and integration practices that can scale across engagements.