Cloud Architect
Steampunk · McLean, VA
$130,000–$215,000from the description
Jun 28, 2026
McLean, VA
Jul 21, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A senior cloud architecture role within a DevSecOps practice, focused on designing and implementing cloud environments across AWS (and potentially Azure or GCP), managing migrations and optimizations, and supporting infrastructure-as-code and CI/CD pipelines. The position suits a deeply experienced cloud practitioner comfortable mentoring junior staff, engaging stakeholders, and working within federal contracting contexts requiring the ability to obtain a U.S. government security clearance.
Senior level · 10+ years · Remote · Bachelor's required · Secret clearance · Full-time
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
Posted 2 times — it's one opening, so apply once.
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
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $135,980 (middle half $105,210–$171,980). 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)
The posting explicitly states candidates should be 'local to the Washington, DC metro area and willing to work on-site in Bethesda, MD'; however, per caller instruction, this role is treated as fully remote and no metro is recorded.
Clearance is listed as 'Ability to obtain a U.S. government Security Clearance' — the specific level is not named. Given the federal contracting context (Homeland, Federal Civilian, Health, DoD sectors), a Secret-level gate is the most reasonable inference, but the actual required level may differ.
The degree requirement is a BS in an IT field OR a BS in a non-IT field plus 2 years of related IT experience; a Master's degree is listed under Preferred. Minimum hard gate is a Bachelor's degree.
The JD requires at least two certifications (one must be a cloud cert) from a named list including PMP, ITIL, CSM, CISSP, and cloud-specific certs (AWS, Azure, GCP). These are hard-gated but are certifications rather than technology skills, so they are not emitted as individual skill entries.
5+ years of experience in database architecture, ETL, BI, big data, ML, or advanced analytics is listed as required; these are domain areas rather than named tools, so they are not emitted as individual skill entries.
Scripting languages (Python, Bash, PowerShell, Groovy, Ruby, Concourse) and automation/container tools (Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, CloudFormation, Ansible, Chef, Pivotal) appear under the Preferred section.
SOC confidence is Medium: the role is titled Cloud Architect and spans both infrastructure design/IaC (closer to 15-1252 Software Developers given the heavy code/automation emphasis) and systems operations (15-1244). The primary day-to-day work — architecting, implementing IaC, and building DevSecOps pipelines — aligns more closely with 15-1252.
Requires a Secret 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.
Caller marked this a fully-remote role — scored against the national candidate pool.
Read the full posting
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