Systems Architect
NT Concepts2 months ago
Vienna, VA, USA or Chantilly, VA, USAStaff+
Base Salary
$131k - $244k/yr
Responsibilities
- Own and communicate the technical vision and systems architecture from concept development through deployment and sustainment.
- Engage mission stakeholders to understand operational needs, workflows, constraints, and desired outcomes.
- Translate mission needs into system concepts, architecture decisions, technical requirements, and roadmaps.
- Define and maintain architecture across applications, data services, integration components, and AI/ML-enabled capabilities.
- Guide prototypes into secure, scalable, supportable operational solutions and establish modular architecture patterns.
- Evaluate technical alternatives and communicate tradeoffs involving mission value, performance, security, cost, schedule, and maintainability.
- Partner with software engineers on application boundaries, service interactions, interfaces, and deployment patterns.
- Define approaches for ingesting, organizing, enriching, and exploiting structured and unstructured data.
- Collaborate with data scientists and AI/ML engineers on model integration, evaluation, monitoring, and human oversight.
- Guide data pipelines supporting analytics, machine learning, and operational decision-making.
- Lead architecture reviews, technical planning, demonstrations, and design discussions with multidisciplinary and Government stakeholders.
- Identify and mitigate architectural, technical, and integration risks; maintain architecture artifacts, interface definitions, decision records, and requirements traceability.
- Mentor engineers and promote sound architecture, software, data, security, and systems engineering practices.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science, systems engineering, data science, or a related technical field.
- At least 10 years of experience in systems architecture, software engineering, or complex technology delivery.
- Demonstrated experience designing and evolving software-intensive systems for operational or mission users.
- Experience translating ambiguous mission or business problems into technical approaches, system concepts, and engineering requirements.
- Experience communicating technical concepts in demonstrations, design reviews, and customer-facing technical exchanges.
- Knowledge of modern software architecture, distributed services, data platforms, cloud-native technologies, and deployment patterns.
- Experience across the engineering lifecycle from concept development and prototyping through integration, deployment, and sustainment.
- Working knowledge of data engineering, analytics, AI/ML, and generative AI concepts.
- Experience integrating AI/ML or data science capabilities into user-facing applications and operational workflows.
- Ability to evaluate system-level tradeoffs and explain technical decisions to technical and nontechnical stakeholders.
- Experience working with Agile software teams in research, prototyping, or rapid-delivery environments.
- Ability to collaborate across software, data, systems engineering, security, and mission teams.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills.
- Active TS/SCI clearance and US citizenship are required.
- Preferred qualifications include an advanced degree, Department of Defense mission experience, command and control or intelligence experience, knowledge of digital engineering or model-based systems engineering, experience with multimodal data, knowledge graphs, semantic search, retrieval-augmented generation, AI/ML performance evaluation, containerized platforms, automated testing, cybersecurity engineering, Risk Management Framework requirements, disconnected or bandwidth-constrained environments, and technical demonstrations.
Benefits
- Virginia pay range is $131,376–$243,984 USD.
- The role is based in Chantilly and Tysons, Virginia, with four days per week on-site.
- NT Concepts offers competitive benefits, professional growth opportunities, skill development, and a collaborative engineering culture.
- Employees may participate in the company’s #NTC_GivesBack social-impact initiative.
Categories
About NT Concepts
NT Concepts is a privately held IT services firm that builds data-driven software and cloud solutions for U.S. national security agencies. It delivers application development, geospatial analytics, AI/ML, and data engineering services through federal contracts to customers across the Department of Defense and Intelligence Community. Founded in 1998 and headquartered in Vienna, Virginia, the company focuses on mission systems modernization and enterprise analytics at classified and unclassified scales.