Systems Architect, Senior Advisor with CMS Experience

Peraton•Woodlawn, MD

27d•$135,000 - $216,000

About The Position

Peraton is seeking a highly experienced Senior Systems / Solutions Architect to provide architectural leadership, technical direction, and innovation for the Medicare Advantage Prescription Drug System (MARx), a mission-critical system supporting the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). MARx supports high-volume Medicare Advantage and Part D enrollment processing, premium calculations, plan payment operations, and information exchanges with CMS systems and external partners. The architect will define and evolve the system architecture to support scalability, reliability, performance, security, maintainability, and operational efficiency as Medicare business requirements, federal regulations, and legislation change. The role works with CMS business owners, the CMS Office of Information Technology, program management, and multidisciplinary technical teams across analysis, design, development, testing, infrastructure, cybersecurity, and production operations. The position combines technical architecture expertise, knowledge of complex business processing, strategic thinking, and hands-on technical leadership. The architect will also advise stakeholders, mentor technical staff, promote engineering excellence, identify optimization opportunities, and help shape MARx’s long-term evolution. The work includes architecture for AWS-hosted applications, PostgreSQL data management, Golang services, system integrations, high-volume processing, operational reliability, modernization, and program delivery.

Requirements

At least 5 years of experience in a senior technical leadership, systems architecture, or solutions architecture role.
Minimum experience depends on education: 12 years with a BS/BA, 10 years with an MS/MA, or 7 years with a Ph.D.
Demonstrated experience architecting large-scale, mission-critical, data-intensive enterprise systems.
Strong experience with high-volume transaction processing, complex business rules, and large-scale data integration.
Experience supporting federal government systems, preferably CMS or other federal healthcare programs.
Proven ability to lead architectural decisions and guide multidisciplinary technical teams.
Experience working directly with business stakeholders, program management, and senior technology leadership.
Strong experience designing and implementing applications on AWS, including knowledge of compute, database, storage, networking, integration, security, and monitoring services.
Experience with cloud-native architecture, high availability, disaster recovery, and infrastructure optimization.
Strong understanding of PostgreSQL architecture, data modeling, SQL optimization, indexing, and transaction management.
Experience designing databases for complex, high-volume transaction processing and knowledge of performance tuning, concurrency, replication, backup, and recovery.
Strong knowledge of Golang and experience designing scalable Go applications, APIs, microservices, and background-processing services.
Understanding of Go concurrency, database integration, error handling, performance optimization, and testing practices.
Extensive experience designing RESTful APIs, asynchronous integrations, batch interfaces, and high-volume data-exchange solutions.
Strong understanding of integration reliability, error handling, transaction traceability, and data reconciliation.
Experience integrating complex systems across organizational and technology boundaries.
Strong knowledge of distributed systems, microservices, service-oriented architecture, and event-driven processing.
Experience with application security, authentication, authorization, encryption, and secure integration patterns.
Understanding of CI/CD, DevSecOps, Infrastructure as Code, containerization, and automated testing.
Experience with performance engineering, capacity planning, observability, and production troubleshooting.
Strong understanding of architecture documentation, design reviews, and technical governance.
Strong understanding of CMS, Medicare programs, and related business operations.
Familiarity with Medicare Advantage and Part D enrollment and payment processing, and with implementing Medicare policy changes and legislative mandates.
Experience supporting systems involving sensitive beneficiary information, complex financial transactions, and stringent regulatory requirements.
Must be a U.S. citizen and able to obtain a Public Trust.
Demonstrated strategic thinking, technical depth, business acumen, thought leadership, collaborative leadership, execution focus, communication skills, and commitment to mentorship.

Nice To Haves

Direct experience with MARx, including its business processes, architecture, interfaces, and operational environment.
Experience with Medicare Advantage and Part D enrollment, premium calculations, payment processing, and reconciliation.
Familiarity with CMS enterprise architecture standards, technology governance, and modernization initiatives.
Experience supporting high-value financial payment-processing systems with stringent accuracy, reconciliation, and audit requirements.
Advanced experience with AWS architecture, PostgreSQL optimization, and Golang application development.
Experience with large-scale batch processing, distributed transaction management, and complex workflow orchestration.
Familiarity with Medicare Advantage Organization and Prescription Drug Plan interfaces and data-exchange requirements.
Experience with AWS services such as ECS/EKS, Lambda, S3, RDS/Aurora PostgreSQL, SQS, SNS, EventBridge, CloudWatch, and Step Functions.
Experience with Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, and modern DevSecOps practices.
Familiarity with federal security and compliance requirements, including FISMA, NIST 800-53, and applicable CMS security policies.
Experience applying AI-assisted engineering, intelligent automation, or emerging technologies to enterprise systems.
AWS Solutions Architect certification or equivalent demonstrated expertise.
Experience leading modernization initiatives while maintaining uninterrupted operations of mission-critical legacy systems.

Responsibilities

Own and evolve MARx’s overall solution architecture to align with CMS business objectives, technology standards, and modernization strategies.
Define architectural principles, technical standards, design patterns, and implementation guidance; maintain architecture documentation and technical decision records.
Lead architectural design for complex, high-volume transaction-processing and data-intensive applications, and conduct design reviews throughout the software development lifecycle.
Evaluate architectural alternatives and address architectural risks, technical debt, and system bottlenecks.
Develop understanding of MARx business operations, including enrollment and disenrollment, premium calculations and withholding, plan payments, retroactive adjustments, reconciliations, payment corrections, and data exchanges.
Design solutions for accurate, timely, traceable, and reliable transactions, with controls for transaction integrity, reconciliation, auditability, and preventing erroneous or duplicate payments.
Translate Medicare business requirements into scalable, maintainable solutions that can accommodate policy, regulatory, and legislative changes.
Lead architecture for MARx applications and services on AWS, including high availability, resilience, disaster recovery, business continuity, observability, and infrastructure cost and performance optimization.
Collaborate with infrastructure and DevSecOps teams on Infrastructure as Code, automated deployments, and environment standardization; ensure alignment with CMS security policies and federal cloud requirements.
Oversee PostgreSQL data architecture, including schemas, data models, indexing, queries, transaction management, performance, batch and bulk operations, availability, backup, recovery, retention, archival, partitioning, and lifecycle management.
Guide Golang application architecture, design patterns, coding standards, APIs, database connectivity, transaction management, error handling, concurrency, testing, security, and performance optimization.
Define secure, reliable integration architecture for CMS systems, external partners, federal agencies, and payment systems, including REST APIs, asynchronous messaging, batch interfaces, and file-based exchanges.
Establish interface standards for validation, error handling, retries, reconciliation, monitoring, versioning, backward compatibility, partner onboarding, and end-to-end transaction traceability.
Establish performance engineering, capacity planning, scalability, batch-processing, orchestration, scheduling, exception-management, recovery, restartability, idempotency, and transaction-consistency approaches.
Collaborate with testing and operations teams on benchmarks, load testing, and reliability objectives; support production incident root-cause analysis and recommend lasting improvements.
Work with CMS business owners and OIT stakeholders as a principal technical advisor; facilitate technical discussions, workshops, and design reviews, and communicate architectural trade-offs to technical and nontechnical audiences.
Coordinate across business analysis, development, database engineering, integration, testing, cloud infrastructure, DevSecOps, cybersecurity, compliance, and production operations.
Support program planning, prioritization, roadmaps, release planning, technical estimates, resource planning, feasibility assessments, risk management, milestone reviews, and customer presentations.
Guide implementation to ensure consistency with approved architecture while balancing long-term objectives with near-term delivery and operational priorities.
Identify modernization and optimization opportunities; evaluate emerging technologies and engineering practices, develop proofs of concept, and promote automation across development, testing, deployment, monitoring, and operations.
Explore responsible use of Generative AI, Agentic AI, and AI-assisted engineering to improve productivity, software quality, operational efficiency, and business processing.
Mentor architects, technical leads, developers, database engineers, and other technical staff through coaching, architecture reviews, knowledge-sharing sessions, and workshops.
Promote engineering standards, technical knowledge transfer, accountability, innovation, quality, collaboration, and continuous improvement.