Cloud Architect

Nava is at the forefront of reimagining how our government serves its people, and we're looking for a Cloud Architect to help us execute on large scale government projects.

You'll work with our internal Nava team as well as our partners to roadmap long term, scalable solutions to issues that millions of Americans face every day.

You can work remotely, or from one of Nava's offices in DC, SF, or NYC.

Opportunities and Challenges

You will be working within the government ecosystem, which means working, sometimes closely, with other government contractors and civil servants. Working with people outside of your company means you'll likely encounter different working styles and cultural norms. At the same time, working as part of a larger team allows us to deliver on projects of larger scale and complexity.

The government also imposes a level of bureaucracy that is typically not present in a company of our size in the private sector. We operate in a regulated environment, where checks and compliance is built into the process of building software. This can make the path to production slower and some decisions, such as tools and processes, lie outside of our control. However, beyond writing code, finding and recommending ways to improve the way government software is built is one of the highest-leverage ways we help fulfill our mission.

You will be working with legacy systems. While our work is to build new systems with up-to-date technology, we have to do that within an existing ecosystem. Our work is building functional, resilient software for production. We don't build flashy prototypes that don't work for real people. This usually means getting to know legacy systems, often with poor documentation and unreliable narrators, and trying to determine how to replicate the systems' behavior or how to integrate with these systems. This is a great opportunity for engineers who enjoy software archaeology. If you care deeply about how software systems work over time, and building systems for longevity and resilience, this work is for you.
What you'll do

• • Set the look and feel of the cloud by providing big picture context and overlap for focused project teams.
  • Work with teams to define the overall cloud architecture for CMS.
  • Speak to stakeholders and customers as the main representative of the cloud on the entirety of the service catalog and product roadmapIdentify technical trends and contracting trends and steer government programs towards success.
  • Identify new tools, technologies, and processes which can be provided through the CMS Cloud platform.
  • Proactively detect risks related to technology and work collaboratively with stakeholders to effectively resolve them
  • Proactively socialize, iterate on, and generate buy-in for engineering initiatives with the team, government partners, and other contractors
  • Collaborate with the project management team to prioritize roadmap and cloud implementation
  • Oversee coordination between engineering to ensure features are rolled out in a holistic fashion.
  • Work to develop common technical and implementation standards across engineering teams.
    
  
  

What we're looking for

• • Ability to influence decision-making at all levels within an organization, using a variety of skills and tools
  • Strong bias towards action; ability to step up into team gaps and ambiguous situations to structure the team's action plan
  • A skilled practitioner with deep understanding of how services and features implement into infrastructure
  • A proven leader who has in-depth experience cultivating strong relationships with external stakeholders and partners
  • An extremely adaptable problem solver who can deal with multi-dimensional challenges involving many organizations, processes, cultures, and technologies
  • Ability to execute with incomplete information; great engineering instincts and an ability to create order from divergent needs
  • Ability to define an IT objective, and logically reverse engineer the path and communications to achieve the objective.
  • Strong understanding of cloud technologies
  • Demonstrated ability to design and implement large IT systems
  • Strong understanding of core networking and cloud technologies.
  • Familiarity with large scale IT operations and support.
  • Previous experience architecting IT systems, networking, patching, web services
  • Experience with multi-vendor environment, with a bonus for experience within government contracting or professional service firms
  • Excellent organizational skills and effective presentation skills
  • An adaptive, empathetic, collaborative leadership mindset
  • Bonus: Experience working in the Civic Tech industry
    
  
  

Other requirements

• • Experience: At least 10+ years of experience
  • Education: Due to contractual requirements, this role requires a Bachelor's Degree (in any discipline).
  • Residency: Lived in United States at least 3 years out of the last 5 years
  • You will be required to obtain a public trust clearance.
    
  
  
  

We're a small team working to radically improve our government, so everyone that joins us has a direct impact on the direction and success of Nava. We are stewards - we hold a deep responsibility towards the systems that we work with. We are a community - we value collaboration both within our teams and with the many hardworking people within government. We offer generous benefits and equity.

We care deeply about diversity and inclusion at Nava. We are an equal opportunity employer and do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

Note: We participate in E-Verify. Upon hire, we will provide the federal government with your Form I-9 information to confirm that you are authorized to work in the U.S. This role is required to work from the contiguous United States.

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