Sr. Azure Architect

FSS Government Solutions is seeking a Senior Azure Architect to lead the design, implementation, and operation of Microsoft Azure and AWS cloud solutions for complex government programs. You will shape cloud architecture for scalability, security, and operational excellence, stand up infrastructure from the ground up, and optimize platforms for AI-enabled products. The work spans solution architecture, secure multi-cloud infrastructure, event-driven systems, and hands-on delivery with engineering teams.

Responsibilities

• Lead cloud architecture for client programs: landing zones, network, identity, data, integration, and application patterns aligned to security and scalability requirements.
• Stand up new cloud infrastructure in Azure or AWS, including accounts/subscriptions, networking, identity, logging, and baseline security controls.
• Optimize architecture for AI products: model-serving and inference paths, retrieval and data pipelines, agent/tool interfaces, cost and latency, evaluation hooks, and secure access to LLMs.
• Design and deliver cloud-native, event-driven platforms that integrate many independent systems into a unified operational ecosystem.
• Architect Azure Durable Functions workflows with Service Bus and Event Grid to orchestrate high daily event volumes with reliability, retries, and recovery.
• Design and implement infrastructure using Azure Virtual Machines, Virtual Networks, Private Link, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), App Services, Functions, and equivalent AWS services (VPC, EC2, Lambda, ECS/EKS) to support microservices and distributed systems.
• Build C# / .NET backend services that generate and distribute structured metadata and events to downstream consumers under tight availability SLAs.
• Integrate internal and external systems through REST and GraphQL; use Azure API Management and/or AWS API Gateway; support AI-enabled integrations, including MCP-style interfaces for LLM tooling.
• Implement durable storage (Blob/Table, S3, and related services) for event-driven exchange, audit, and recovery.
• Develop infrastructure as code and deployment pipelines (Terraform, Bicep, CloudFormation or CDK, Azure DevOps / AWS pipelines, PowerShell, Bash) to standardize and automate environments.
• Lead or support migration of applications and data to Azure and AWS with minimal disruption and documented security controls.
• Implement identity and access management with Microsoft Entra ID and AWS IAM, least-privilege RBAC, Key Vault / Secrets Manager, and encryption in transit and at rest.
• Design resilient network and hybrid connectivity (VPN, ExpressRoute, Direct Connect, private endpoints) for secure access to government and partner systems.
• Embed FedRAMP and related federal control baselines into architecture, including logging, monitoring, segmentation, and evidence for ATO packages.
• Establish observability: structured logging, distributed tracing, and alerting in Application Insights, Azure Monitor, and CloudWatch.
• Influence architecture decisions, raise engineering quality, and mentor developers and cloud engineers.
• Translate stakeholder requirements into production-ready designs and incremental delivery under Agile / SDLC practices.

Required qualifications

• Senior or lead experience designing and implementing enterprise cloud solutions on Azure or AWS, including production event-driven and distributed systems.
• Demonstrated experience standing up infrastructure (new subscriptions/accounts, landing zones, networking, identity, CI/CD, and baseline observability), not only extending existing estates.
• Experience optimizing architecture for AI products, including inference/serving design, data and retrieval pipelines, tool/MCP integration, cost, latency, reliability, and security of model access.
• Strong C# / .NET (including .NET 6/8+ and ASP.NET Core) used to build cloud services, not only diagrams.
• Hands-on Azure: Functions, Durable Functions, Service Bus, Event Grid, API Management, App Services, Blob Storage, Table Storage, Key Vault, App Configuration, Virtual Networks, and Entra ID.
• Hands-on AWS configuration: IAM, VPC, EC2, Lambda, S3, and related compute/network/storage services used in production.
• Experience with service-oriented and microservice architectures, including orchestration, pub/sub, idempotency, and failure handling.
• REST and GraphQL integration; API gateway design and operations.
• SQL Server and data access via EF Core or equi…