Principal Cloud Platform Architect

This role is part of a growing program, and hiring will depend on available funding. We review applications on a rolling basis, but the timeline for interviews and offers may vary. In some cases, we may extend contingent offers that become active once funding is confirmed.

This position is located in Gaithersburg, MD; Egg Harbor Township, NJ; or Eagan, MN. This is an opportunity to contribute to projects that impact millions of air travelers. 

This is a hybrid position requiring 3 days onsite and 2 days remote work.  Candidates should reside a commutable distance to one of the above locations. 

Leidos is seeking a Principal Cloud & Platform Architect to join the Air Traffic Business Area within the Homeland Sector, supporting the development of the Leidos Common Automation Platform (L-CAP). L-CAP is a mission-critical, future-ready automation platform built on a hybrid cloud data mesh architecture, enabling next-generation air traffic management capabilities. You will serve as the enterprise platform architect responsible for designing the hybrid cloud infrastructure and platform services that underpin the L-CAP automation platform. We are building with an AI-first engineering mindset, embracing emerging AI capabilities and modern development practices to accelerate delivery, improve software quality, and continuously evolve how we design and build mission-critical systems. This position supports government programs and requires the ability to obtain and maintain a favorable Public Trust investigation. 

What You'll Do:

• Design the hybrid cloud architecture spanning on-premises and cloud environments 

• Define Kubernetes orchestration strategy for containerized workloads at scale 

• Establish Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) governance using Terraform 

• Architect FedRAMP-compliant platform designs across multiple environments 

• Design and govern CI/CD platform services for engineering teams 

• Lead capacity planning and infrastructure cost modeling 

• Define platform reliability standards including SLOs and SLIs 

• Design multi-environment deployment strategy (dev, test, staging, production) 

• Oversee container orchestration patterns and service mesh architecture 

• Drive cloud cost optimization and FinOps practices 

• Design platform architecture to host safety-critical ATC applications with deterministic performance characteristics rather than general enterprise IT workloads 

• Ensure operational resilience and failover capabilities for distributed real-time ATC services across hybrid cloud deployments 

• Define platform requirements for deterministic distributed services including latency guarantees and predictable resource allocation 

• Champion an AI-first engineering culture by identifying and applying AI-assisted development capabilities, automation, and emerging software engineering practices that improve developer productivity, code quality, testing, and delivery. 

Core Technical Qualifications: 

• Bachelor's degree with 12+ years of cloud and platform engineering experience 

• Expert-level cloud architecture experience with AWS or Azure GovCloud 

• Production Kubernetes experience at scale (100+ nodes) 

• Deep Terraform/IaC expertise for enterprise infrastructure management 

• Platform engineering leadership for large development organizations 

• FedRAMP platform compliance and boundary design experience 

• Container orchestration and microservices platform design 

• Distributed systems architecture and reliability engineering 

• Microservices platform design supporting hundreds of services 

• Ability to obtain and maintain a Public Trust clearance; US citizenship required; subject to government background investigation 

• Experience supporting deterministic distributed services with strict latency and availability requirements 

• Knowledge of platform engineering for safety-critical applications versus general enterprise workloads 

• Ability to obtain and maintain a Public Trust 

• U.S. citizenship required 

• Successful completion of background investigations as required by the government customer 

Preferred / Desired Qualifications: 

• AWS Solutions Architect Professional or Azure Solutions Architect Expert certification 

• GovCloud deployment and operations experience 

• Air-gapped and disconnected environment architecture 

• Platform-as-a-Service design for internal developer teams 

• SRE and reliability engineering practices 

• Helm, ArgoCD, and GitOps deployment patterns 

• Service mesh implementation (Istio, Linkerd) 

• Experience with hybrid cloud deployment of real-time operational systems in aviation or similar safety-critical domains

Why Leidos?

You’ll work on systems where performance, precision, and reliability matter — every second. This is not experimental AI for prototypes. This is disciplined, responsible AI applied to mission-critical software that supports national infrastructure.

If you’re excited by solving complex problems in regulated, real-world environments — and using AI as a force multiplier rather than a shortcut — we’d like to talk.

ATMC

If you're looking for comfort, keep scrolling. At Leidos, we outthink, outbuild, and outpace the status quo — because the mission demands it. We're not hiring followers. We're recruiting the ones who disrupt, provoke, and refuse to fail. Step 10 is ancient history. We're already at step 30 — and moving faster than anyone else dares.

Original Posting:

Pay Range:

The Leidos pay range for this job level is a general guideline only and not a guarantee of compensation or salary. Additional factors considered in extending an offer include (but are not limited to) responsibilities of the job, education, experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities, as well as internal equity, alignment with market data, applicable bargaining agreement (if any), or other law.