Principal Cloud Architect

This is a U.S. based position. All of the programs we support require U.S. citizenship to be eligible for employment. All work must be conducted within the continental U.S.

Who we are:

Raft (https://goraft.tech) is a customer-obsessed non-traditional small business with a purposeful focus on Distributed Data Systems, Platforms at Scale, and Complex Application Development, with headquarters in Reston, VA. Our range of clients include innovative federal and public agencies leveraging design thinking, cutting edge tech stack, and cloud native ecosystem. We build digital solutions that impact the lives of millions of Americans.

We’re looking for an experienced Principal Cloud Architect to support our customer and join our passionate team of high-impact problem solvers. You will work cross-functionally to help our customer design, plan, implement, and guide enterprise strategies. In this role, you will be a technical advisor who will help to lead and direct the execution of the cloud strategy by combining expertise and business insights. You will partner with other teams to drive strategic initiatives for solutions. This position will be remote, but may require travel to Langley or Boston occasionally. 

About the role:

The Infrastructure Engineer - Cloud Architect shall have extensive experience in cloud computing that includes on premise, hybrid, and commercial cloud management. The engineer will be, at least, a mid to senior-level engineer capable of mentoring junior developers and engineers.  The engineer shall be able to provision, manage, and secure cloud infrastructure with expertise through infrastructure as code implementations at an Individual Contributor Level. The engineer will possess effective communication skills to interact with various stakeholders internal and external to the organization. 

What we are looking for:  

• 3+ years of extensive knowledge of AWS Cloud Services
• 3+ years of experience in architecting and implementing fully automated, secure, scalable multi-cloud solutions via Terraform and Ansible
• Experience with network infrastructure, setting up Firewalls, WAFs and network ACLs
• Experience with microservices architecture and deploying Kubernetes Environments 
• Experience developing containerized services deployed in production on orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes, Mesos, Swarm, etc. 
• Experience with agile and lean software development philosophies 
• Experience working with relational and/or non-relational databases e.g. PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Elasticsearch etc. 
• Ability to collaborate with Cloud and DevOps engineers to develop secure, highly scalable enterprise cloud products 
• Obtain Security+ certificate within the first 90 days of employment 

Highly preferred: 

• Experience working as a software engineer leveraging large-scale cloud infrastructure as their primary application platform 
• AWS or Azure certification, including Solution Architect, Developer, Administrator, Security, or DevOps 
• Ability to collaborate with Cloud and DevOps engineers to solve technical and design problems 
• Experience successfully leading software, data center, and/or on-premise infrastructure engineering teams in adoption of cloud, hybrid and on-premise cloud-native architecture 
• A deep understanding of modern security best practices for cloud infrastructure and networks 
• Experience building declarative infrastructure using modern Infrastructure as Code techniques 
• Two-plus experience in scripting (PowerShell, JSON, and Python)

Clearance Requirements:  

• Ability to obtain and maintain a U.S. SECRET Security Clearance 

Work Type:  

• Remote 

What we will offer you:  

• Highly competitive salary 
• Fully covered healthcare, dental, and vision coverage 
• 401(k) and company match 
• Unlimited PTO + 11 paid holidays 
• Education & training benefits 
• Annual budget for your tech/gadgets needs 
• Monthly box of yummy snacks to eat while doing meaningful work 
• Team off-site in fun places! 
• Generous Referral Bonuses 
• And More!

Our Vision Statement:  

We bridge the gap between humans and data through radical transparency and our obsession with the mission.

Our Customer Obsession:

We will approach every deliverable like it's a product. We will adopt a customer-obsessed mentality. As we grow, and our footprint becomes larger, teams and employees will treat each other not only as teammates but customers. W