Responsibilities
This is an opportunity for an experienced, driven software solutions architect to join a dynamic team working to implement and manage the FAA's highly-visible System Wide Information Management (SWIM) program as part of the NextGen transformation strategy.
Lead the reliability, performance and operations work-streams for the FAA System-Wide Information Management (SWIM) Flight Data Publication Service (SFDPS) program: define RMA improvement plans, implement Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices (SLIs/SLOs/SLAs), lead incident response playbooks, and architect cloud-native solutions to meet FAA Efficiency Critical requirements during the migration.
Primary responsibilities
- Define and implement SRE program for SFDPS: set SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, and runbooks tied to FAA Efficiency Critical objectives.
- Lead performance tuning, capacity planning, and high-availability design across containerized services.
- Design resilient architectures in the FAA cloud (multi-AZ, autoscaling, disaster recovery patterns).
- Drive CI/CD for safety- and compliance-focused deployments
- Define security controls and coordinate with Authorizing Officials and security SMEs to meet FedRAMP/FISMA and FAA baselines (hardening, secrets management, vulnerability scanning).
- Lead major incidents and postmortems; ensure permanent corrective actions to raise availability and maintainability.
- Provide architectural guidance, mentor mid/junior engineers, and represent the engineering team to stakeholders.
Required Qualifications
- Bachelor of Science degree and 9 years of relevant professional experience. Substitutions: Any substitutions are subject to further customer review and approvals
- or Associates degree and 11 years of relevant professional experience
- or Masters degree and 6 years of total relevant experience.
- A strong engineering background in systems reliability, cloud operations, and container platforms.
- Hands-on experience developing and maintaining Java-based applications, including debugging, optimization, and refactoring.
- Proficiency in a language suited for high-throughput systems, such as Java, Go, Python, or .NET for backend development
- Deep experience with Red Hat/OpenShift, Kubernetes architecture, and container security best practices.
- Proven SRE experience: defining SLIs/SLOs, implementing monitoring/alerting, and incident management.
- Strong IaC and automation experience (Terraform, Ansible, CI/CD pipelines).
- Practical experience working with C and/or C++ components, especially in integration with Java or containerization scenarios.
- Proficient scripting ability in Python, Bash, or similar to automate build, deploy, and cloud operations workflows.
- Hands-on experience in a FedRAMP/Government cloud environment and working with federal security/compliance controls strongly preferred.
- Proven experience with at least one major message broker, such as Apache Kafka, RabbitMQ, IBM MQ, Solace, or NATS.
- Experience with data serialization formats, specifically JSON, XML, Avro, or Protobuf.
- Knowledge of messaging protocols like AMQP, MQTT, JMS, or STOMP.
- Understanding of asynchronous messaging patterns, pub-sub, and point-to-point queues.
- Strong communication, leadership, and cross-team coordination skills; Agile experience (Scrum, SAFe) and prior role as technical lead or site reliability lead.
- U.S. citizen or Green Card Permanent Resident (3+ years ouf of the last 5 years U.S. residency).
- Ability to obtain and maintain FAA Suitability.
Desired Qualifications
- Certifications: CKA, RHCE, AWS Certified DevOps Engineer (GovCloud), CISSP, or similar.
- Prior FAA or ATM systems experience is highly desirable.
- Experience with Cloud-based messaging services (e.g.AWS SNS/SQS, Azure Service Bus, Google Pub/Sub).
Posted Salary Range
USD $105,100.00 - USD $164,125.00 /Yr.
