Senior Systems & Solutions Architect

Company Description

Dcode is a team of doers dedicated to bridging the gap between the speed of technology and the federal government. We align people, culture, policies, and processes to get tech into the hands of those who need it most. Operating at the nexus of government leaders, emerging technology companies, and venture capital, we turn roadblocks into results.

The Role

We are hiring a technical systems architect to work in complex and restricted mission environments. You will evaluate existing systems and mission requirements to create organized architectural structures. Your role involves leading government and engineering stakeholders through the process of designing and deploying functional technology.

You will work with government clients, operators, program leaders, engineers, security teams, vendors, and Dcode teams. Your role is to turn complex mission requirements into system architectures that are secure, scalable, and ready to be built.

You will work directly on architectural tasks rather than observing from the sidelines. Your responsibilities include assessing current systems and constraints, defining future architectures, and developing technical requirements and integration strategies. You will evaluate tradeoffs and support teams throughout the process from initial concepts to final implementation.

Effective architecture is defined by its performance in a real environment rather than its theoretical elegance. You must design solutions that account for existing legacy systems, security requirements, and established acquisition processes. Your design should also consider organizational ownership, long-term sustainment, and the specific capacity of the government to deploy and manage the final capability.

This role is based out of Washington, DC

Salary range: $116,000- $152,000 plus bi-annual bonuses

Current/Active Top Secret clearance and be eligible for SCI and SAP access and a current Counterintelligence (CI) Polygraph is strongly preferred. Eligibility for clearance is required.

What You'll Do

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.

What We're Looking For

You have extensive experience with the design and implementation of complex system architectures. This work was performed within government, national security, or other mission environments that are highly regulated.

More importantly, you can show that you have:

• Taken ambiguous operational or business problems and turned them into coherent technical architectures.
• Designed systems involving multiple applications, platforms, networks, data sources, interfaces, or infrastructure environments.
• Developed technical requirements and architecture artifacts that engineers could actually implement.
• Worked across architecture, engineering, cybersecurity, infrastructure, software, data, and operational teams.
• Made and defended difficult architecture tradeoffs rather than simply documenting ideal-state designs.
• Led technical efforts involving multiple stakeholders, organizations, vendors, or engineering disciplines.
• Communicated effectively with both deeply technical teams and senior decision-makers.
• Worked successfully in environments where security, compliance, legacy technology, organizational boundaries, and operational constraints materially affect the solution.

Particularly Valuable Experience

We are looking for candidates with extensive experience in one or more of these areas:

• National security systems: Department of Defense, Intelligence Community, command and control, communications, networking, or other classified mission environments.
• Systems engineering and architecture: DoDAF, MBSE/SysML, digital engineering, operational and system views, interface control documents, requirements traceability, or similar practices.
• Modern infrastructure: Cloud-native and hybrid architectures, edge computing, APIs, microservices, Zero Trust, identity and access management, DevSecOps, or data platforms.
• AI-enabled systems: LLMs, agents, RAG, AI orchestration, MCP or similar interoperability patterns, and secure integration of AI capabilities with enterprise systems.
• 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 are helpful, but we value proven skills over simply having credentials.

You'll Excel in This Role If You

• Think in systems and naturally look for the relationships between technology, users, mission processes, security, policy, acquisition, and operations.
• Can move comfortably from an executive discussion about mission outcomes into a detailed conversation with engineers about interfaces and implementation.
• Create structure when requirements, ownership, interfaces, or future-state decisions are incomplete.
• Know when an architectural ideal is worth defending-and when operational reality demands a pragmatic compromise.
• Ask the questions that uncover hidden dependencies and integration risks before they become delivery problems.
• Can explain why an architecture should work, where it is likely to fail, and what assumptions it depends on.
• Care more about getting useful capability into the hands of users than producing impressive architecture diagrams.

Additional Information

We Look for Resilient Hustlers

Our CEO busted her face on the balance beam in college and got back up. Our co-founder has knocked on a thousand doors, was rejected 999 times, and kept on knocking. What is your story?

Equal Opportunity

Dcode is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We consider qualified applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws.