Senior Enterprise Architect (Federal IT)

OmniVista Consulting; Washington (District of Columbia); Remote; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

OmniVista Consulting is seeking a Senior Enterprise Architect to define and govern the target-state technology architecture for a federal IT portfolio. The role owns the architecture baseline, target state, and sequenced plan, translating work into board-ready decisions supported by proofs of concept.

This hands-on architecture role collaborates with solution architects, product managers, security staff, and governance boards to ensure compliance with FedRAMP, FISMA, and NIST.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in enterprise or solution architecture.
• Experience producing current-state baseline and target-state architecture with sequenced transition plan.
• Owning technology standards, product lists, and inventories in an enterprise setting.
• Experience with build, buy, or re-platform analyses.
• Presenting architecture recommendations to senior government stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Define and maintain current and target architecture baselines.
• Develop transition plans linked to delivery roadmaps.
• Maintain architecture repository as authoritative source of artifacts.
• Own technology standards catalog and product lists; manage exceptions and technical debt.
• Produce governance-facing decisions and evidence for boards.

Skills

Enterprise Architecture

Solution Architecture

Governance

FedRAMP

FISMA

NIST

Cloud Architecture

IaC (Terraform/Ansible)

Security & Compliance

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science / Information Systems / Engineering

Graduate degree preferred

Tools

Terraform

Ansible Tower

Docker

Kubernetes

Jenkins

Git

AWS/Azure

Okta / Microsoft Entra ID

Job description

Location Washington, DC metro area — remote with occasional on-site presence; local residency required

Clearance Public Trust Tier 2 (Moderate Background Investigation)

Level:Senior — 8+ years

Location:Remote, with occasional on-site presence in Washington, DC. Candidates must currently reside in the Washington, DC metropolitan area (DC, Maryland, or Northern Virginia). Relocation is not offered.

Clearance:Public Trust Tier 2 (Moderate Background Investigation). U.S. Citizen a Must. An active Tier 2 Public Trust or higher is strongly preferred.

OmniVista Consulting is seeking a senior Enterprise Architect to define and govern target-state technology architecture for a federal IT portfolio. The role owns the architecture baseline, the target state, and the sequenced plan that connects them, and translates that work into decisions leadership can act on.

This is a hands‑on architecture role. Recommendations reach governance boards supported by working proofs of concept, not slide decks. The position works closely with solution architects, product managers, security staff, and enterprise governance boards, and ensures architecture decisions align with federal compliance frameworks including FedRAMP, FISMA, and NIST.

Key Responsibilities

Current-State Baseline and Target-State Architecture

• Establish and maintain the architecture baseline, reconciled against the portfolio register, configuration management database, and asset inventories.
• Define the target-state architecture across business capability, data, application, and technology layers, with stated architecture principles.
• Produce and maintain the transition and sequencing plan that reaches the target state, tied to the delivery roadmap.
• Build and maintain the enterprise architecture repository as the authoritative source for all architecture-related artifacts — models, documents, standards, baseline, target state, and decision records.
• Hold each architecture function as a distinct, owned artifact rather than one undifferentiated model: enterprise architecture, the application list, the software list, the product management framework, and data, solution, technical, and business architecture and analysis.

Technology Standards and Portfolio Governance

• Own the approved technology standards catalog, the approved product list, the application list, and the software list, including status, owner, applicability, and review date per entry.
• Maintain a dated exception register with compensating controls so variances do not become permanent by default.
• Maintain the technical debt register and carry each item’s cost and risk into investment prioritization.
• Report architecture measures: standards conformance, exception count and age, duplicate capability, reuse rate, and obsolescence exposure.

Product Assessment and Alternatives Analysis

• Produce alternatives analyses in response to demand requests as they arrive through intake, delivered with product and platform roadmap impact and a solution architecture recommendation attached.
• Assess new product requests for FedRAMP authorization status and whether that authorization covers the specific offering under consideration.
• Determine the service model — software as a service, platform as a service, or self-hosted — and state what operational and security responsibility remains with the organization.
• Quantify the configuration-versus-customization split and its upgrade and maintenance consequences.
• Lead weighted alternatives analyses and recommend whether to retain, consolidate, renegotiate, replace, or retire a capability, applying a fixed reuse, then buy, then build sequence.
• Lead low‑code platform rationalization where overlapping products — for example Microsoft Power Platform, Pega, and ServiceNow low‑code — serve one class of solution, treated as a portfolio decision rather than a tooling preference.

Cloud Architecture and Modernization

• Define cloud architecture patterns that capture faster deployment and elastic scaling while avoiding vendor lock‑in.
• Establish Infrastructure as Code standards for repeatable environments using Terraform, Ansible Tower, or comparable automation.
• Set architecture expectations for automatic failure handling including health checks, graceful degradation, and tested recovery.
• Establish accessibility as an architecture input: Section 508 and WCAG conformance designed into target‑state patterns and verified in delivery rather than discovered at release.

Innovation and Emerging Technology

• Evaluate emerging technologies — artificial intelligence and machine learning, automation, cloud computing, blockchain, low‑code and no‑code platforms, and DevOps tooling — against mission value, feasibility, security, interoperability, and cost.
• Embed research and development, prototyping, and piloting inside the architecture analysis process, releasing working code‑based proofs of concept as an integral part of architecture and related decisions.
• Close each proof of concept with a documented finding: graduation onto the roadmap with evidence attached, or a negative result delivered cheaply, which is a successful outcome.

Governance and Stakeholder Engagement

• Prepare and present architecture decision packages to enterprise governance boards — portfolio review, architecture and engineering review, and standards working groups — covering the business problem, current and proposed architecture, affected systems, standards alignment, security and accessibility considerations, alternatives, lifecycle impacts, dependencies, risks, and the decision requested.
• Record decisions and rationale, assign action owners with due dates, and track actions to closure.
• Provide architecture guidance to product teams early in design, before expensive commitments are made.
• Coach government architects and product staff so the practice is sustainable without contractor support.
• Explain architecture tradeoffs to non‑technical decision makers in plain language.

Required Qualifications

Education

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• A graduate degree in computer science, information systems, engineering, or a related field is preferred but not required.

Experience

• 8+ years in enterprise or solution architecture, including 5+ years in enterprise architecture specifically.
• Demonstrated experience producing a current-state baseline and a target-state architecture with a sequenced transition plan.
• Experience owning technology standards, an approved product list, and application or software inventories in an enterprise setting.
• Experience conducting build, buy, or re-platform analyses with documented, weighted criteria.
• Experience presenting architecture recommendations to senior government stakeholders and defending them under challenge.
• Experience in federal government IT environments, including security and compliance frameworks such as FedRAMP, FISMA, and NIST.

Technical Skills

• Deep cloud architecture knowledge in AWS or Azure, including AWS GovCloud or Azure Government, container platforms, and identity integration.
• Infrastructure as Code proficiency with Terraform, Ansible or Ansible Tower, or comparable.
• Working knowledge of enterprise architecture repository tooling and architecture modeling practice.
• Identity and access management patterns including SAML, OAuth 2.0, SCIM, and Kerberos, with enterprise providers such as Microsoft Entra ID or Okta.
• API management platforms — WSO2 API Manager, Azure API Management, or comparable — including published API catalogs, versioning, and rate limiting.
• ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management and Application Portfolio Management as sources of portfolio, investment, and asset data.
• Azure DevOps boards, pipelines, test plans, and artifacts, with Git under Visual Studio licensing, as the delivery environment architecture decisions land in.
• Container registries and orchestration — Docker, Amazon ECS, or Kubernetes — and CI/CD orchestration with Jenkins.
• Data governance and cataloging platforms such as Immuta or Microsoft Purview.
• Security scanning and monitoring tooling in an enterprise pipeline — for example Tenable, Acunetix, Guardium, Splunk, and platform availability monitoring.

Certifications (Preferred)

• TOGAF certification or an equivalent architecture framework credential
• AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional, or Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert
• Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP)
• ITIL Foundation v4
• Hands‑on technical depth sufficient to build or direct a working proof of concept — API design, containerization, Infrastructure as Code, or low‑code development.
• Ability to build architecture governance that speeds delivery rather than slowing it.
• Experience reducing a tool estate and documenting the resulting savings.
• Strong documentation skills for architecture, standards, and decision records.
• Comfort operating in a compliance‑driven environment with constrained staff.