AI Solutions Architect & Tech Lead

Simple Technology Solutions is looking for an AI Solutions Architect & Tech Lead to add to our team.

• US Citizenship and the ability to obtain and maintain a Public Trust clearance are required
• Bachelor's Degree is required
• Minimum of 8 years' position related experience is required
• AWS Solutions Architect certification (Associate or Professional) preferred for hire; the AWS and Anthropic Claude certifications listed under Required Certifications must be earned within 12 months of hire
• Remote position with occasional travel to client sites and STS events
• Candidates living in the DC Metro region (within driving distance for quarterly in-person team events) are strongly preferred; STS is a HUBZone company, so residence in a HUBZone is favored for remote candidates

The AI Solutions Architect & Tech Lead is the technical and delivery owner of an STS AI application project, from first conversation with the client through production release. You establish and run new projects using the STS SDLC for AI App Development and your own AI tooling, deciding how the lifecycle is tailored, whether the OpenCORA web-app chassis applies, and when AWS-native generative AI services are the right answer instead. Success looks like a small team shipping working software to real federal users every week, with a clean audit trail from requirements to code, and clients who trust your judgment on what to build next. You are the person STS points to when a customer asks, "Who is going to make our AI solution real?"

• Lead the technical delivery of AI application projects for federal clients, serving as the accountable architect and day-to-day tech lead for a team of engineers, analysts, and testers.
• Establish each new project on the STS SDLC for AI App Development, tailoring its phases (Agree, Prove, Deliver, Validate), gates, and templates to the project's size, risk, and client constraints.
• Design solution architectures for generative AI applications, including retrieval-augmented generation, agentic workflows, and integrations with client systems, and document them in architecture decision records.
• Decide when to build on the OpenCORA chassis, when to build on AWS-native services such as Amazon Bedrock, Bedrock Agents, Knowledge Bases, Lambda, and API Gateway, and when to use Claude Code and agentic development tooling directly.
• Run the team's agile delivery approach, choosing Kanban or Scrum per project, owning backlog grooming and prioritization, and using AI assistance for those activities wherever the client allows.
• Operate as the conductor of the project's AI development workflow, orchestrating shared agents and skills across developer, tester, and release-manager roles and keeping the requirements trio (use cases, mockups, specifications) as the source of truth.
• Drive mission fit by getting cheap, early feedback from actual end users before and during the build, and adjust scope and priorities based on what is learned.
• Serve as the primary technical point of contact for the client, communicating status, risks, trade-offs, and recommendations in plain language.
• Enforce engineering standards including test-driven development, infrastructure as code, and the DEV/TST/STG/PRD promotion path, and remove obstacles that slow the team down.
• Mentor team members, review designs and pull requests, and continuously improve the STS SDLC with lessons learned from each engagement.
• Support business development by contributing to proposals, demonstrations, and technical discussions with prospective federal customers.

Required

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related technical field; a master's degree is a plus
• Minimum of 8 years of professional software engineering experience, including at least 3 years leading technical delivery teams and at least 2 years designing and shipping production applications built on large language models
• Demonstrated experience as the accountable architect for a cloud-hosted application on AWS, including security and compliance considerations for a federal or regulated customer
• Hands-on experience running agile delivery (Kanban and Scrum), grooming and prioritizing a backlog, and managing work in Jira or an equivalent tool
• Deep working knowledge of AWS services for AI applications, including Amazon Bedrock, Lambda, API Gateway, IAM, and related networking and storage services
• Hands-on proficiency with Claude Code or comparable agentic coding tools, prompt and context engineering, and designing agent and skill libraries for a team
• Strong grounding in use-case-driven requirements, spec-driven development, and test-driven development
• Ability to read and write production code in at least one modern language (Python or TypeScript preferred) and to review infrastructure as code (Terraform)
• Familiarity with federal security frameworks such as FedRAMP, NIST 800-53, and CJIS, and with the RMF and ATO process
• Comfortable making and owning architectural decisions with incomplete information, and changing them when evidence says to
• Able to hold technical depth and client-facing leadership at the same time without dropping either
• Self-directed and comfortable owning outcomes on a small, senior team where everyone contributes across the lifecycle
• Curious and current on AI tooling; treats AI assistants as part of the team and holds their output to the same standard as human work
• Clear, candid communicator with federal clients and teammates; writes well and documents as a habit
• Bias toward fast delivery and early user feedback over conservative gating; learns from failure quickly

Required Certifications (to be earned within 12 months of hire)

• AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (or higher)
• Claude Certified Architect – Foundations (CCAR-F)

Preferred Certifications

• AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional
• AWS Certified AI Practitioner or AWS Certified Generative AI Developer – Professional
• Claude Certified Architect – Professional (CCAR-P)
• Project Management Professional (PMP), Certified ScrumMaster (CSM), or Professional Scrum Master (PSM I)