Cloud Solutions Architect (AWS)
Core One · McLean, VA
$250,000–$270,000from the description
Jul 21, 2026
McLean, VA
Jul 23, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A senior AWS cloud architecture role focused on designing, implementing, and governing secure, highly available cloud infrastructure for mission-critical national security applications. The position involves setting technical standards across compute, storage, networking, and security services, while ensuring compliance with federal frameworks such as NIST RMF, FedRAMP, and ICD 503. It suits an experienced cloud architect comfortable working across DevSecOps, application, and data teams in an Intelligence Community environment.
Senior level · 8+ years · Bachelor's required · TS/SCI clearance · Full-time
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $138,970 (middle half $107,524–$175,762). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (9)
No work location or metro area is specified in the posting. The TS/SCI with Polygraph requirement strongly implies an on-site position in the National Capital Region or another major IC hub, but no city or state is stated.
The role title is 'Cloud Solutions Architect.' This sits between a pure software developer (15-1252) and a systems/cloud architect occupation; 15-1252 was chosen because the primary day-to-day work involves designing, implementing, and governing cloud infrastructure and application architectures — work BLS classifies under Software Developers. 15-1299 (Computer Occupations, All Other) is noted as a plausible alternative given the architect framing.
The 8+ years requirement is at the role level (IT systems engineering, cloud engineering, or architecture); the 5+ years is specific to AWS architecture. Both are captured accordingly.
The extensive list of AWS services (EC2, ECS, EKS, Lambda, S3, EFS, FSx, RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB, ElastiCache, VPC, Transit Gateway, Route 53, PrivateLink, IAM, KMS, CloudTrail, GuardDuty, Security Hub, AWS Config) appears under the 'Key Responsibilities' section rather than a formal 'Required Qualifications' block. However, the role is explicitly described as requiring 'deep expertise' in AWS cloud architecture and these services are the core of the job's technical scope, so they are treated as required.
Terraform and CloudFormation are listed together as standards to establish; Terraform is named first with CloudFormation as an alternative.
Monitoring tools (CloudWatch, X-Ray, Splunk, Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana) appear in the responsibilities narrative rather than the Required Qualifications section, so they are marked preferred.
AWS GovCloud, SAFe Agile, and ITIL appear under 'Desired Qualifications' and are marked preferred.
ICD 503 and Zero Trust Architecture are mentioned as compliance requirements in the responsibilities but do not appear as named tools/technologies — they are frameworks/standards and are omitted per the no-generic-concepts rule. NIST RMF and FedRAMP are retained as they are concrete, named compliance frameworks commonly treated as skills in IC hiring.
Requires a TS/SCI clearance — the cleared population is a small fraction of this occupation, so the real candidate pool is materially smaller than the estimate below, which does not model clearance.
Read the full posting
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