Chief Solution Architect

Company Overview

By Light Professional IT Services LLC readies warfighters and federal agencies with technology and systems engineered to connect, protect, and prepare individuals and teams for whatever comes next. Headquartered in McLean, VA, By Light supports defense, civilian, and commercial IT customers worldwide.

Responsibilities

• The Chief Solution Architect will provide overall technical leadership and architectural governance for the application maintenance and modernization program, serving as the principal technical authority across all project teams.
• This individual will establish and maintain enterprise architecture standards, guide the modernization strategy from legacy on-premise systems to AWS cloud services, and ensure technical decisions align with both immediate operational needs and long-term strategic objectives.
• The Chief Architect will collaborate closely with government technical leads, review and approve major architectural decisions, oversee technical risk management, and ensure that all solutions comply with federal security requirements and GSA enterprise architecture standards while optimizing for performance, scalability, and cost-effectiveness.

Required Experience/Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or related technical field AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional certification
• Minimum 8 years' experience in one or more architecture domains (e.g., business architecture, solutions architecture, application architecture)

Preferred Experience/Qualifications

• Advanced knowledge and experience in one or more current programming languages (e.g., Java, JavaScript (including AngularJS), Python, Rust, Go, or PHP)
• Experience defining the architecture of cloud deployed applications (AWS preferred)
• Expertise in service-oriented architecture, web services, and Application Programming Interfaces
• Experience defining and driving SecDevOps best practices within large teams, including AI assisted code development
• Experience establishing legacy modernization and migration technical roadmaps for large scale applications
• Experience building applications using service-oriented, microservice, and/or API based architectures at an enterprise scale
• Experience with event-driven applications using queues, service bus and other related patterns
• Experience in working closely with technical leads, engineering teams and architecture stakeholders for technical issues and architecture framework capabilities for use by other development teams
• Ability to translate technically complex features into plain language for leadership
• Experience with AI RAG/LLM implementations and experience implementing and successfully leveraging agentic AI to accelerate software development

Special Requirements/Security Clearance

• Ability to obtain and maintain a Public Trust