Principal Solutions Architect (Remote) (Washington)

Credence Management Solutions is a $500M+, 2,000-employee federal IT services firm, ranked in the Washington Technology Top 100. We position ourselves as an AI-native federal services company under the Credence.ai brand — Trusted Human Expertise + Secure Agentic AI — and AI/ML is one of our top technical differentiators alongside DevSecOps, Cloud, Data, and Cybersecurity.

We are growing our practice supporting the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) , and we have an immediate need for a Principal Solutions Architect to help us build and scale that work. This is a foundational technical hire.

As Principal Solutions Architect, you will own the end-to-end technical architecture for VA IT modernization programs — setting reference architectures, making platform and integration decisions, and validating solutions through delivery. You will partner directly with our VA practice lead (a former Deputy Chief Information Officer at VA) to shape our technical posture with VA customers.

This is a hands-on senior individual contributor role. You are a player-coach : still hands‑on with code, reference architectures, and proofs of concept, while also representing Credence technically in customer meetings, capture activity, and strategy discussions. This is not a people‑management role today — as the practice grows, you will naturally become the technical center of gravity for the engineers we hire, mentoring by credibility rather than by org chart.

While we scale up the VA practice, you will work from Credence's shared solutions architecture pool, supporting DoD delivery programs alongside your VA‑focused capture work. Over time, your focus will shift primarily to VA as our pipeline converts.

Credence runs a flat, empowered capture and delivery culture . Senior technical leaders are active partners in winning work, not just delivering it. You should expect to wear many hats and to spend a meaningful portion of your first 12 months contributing to pre‑award activity — technical volumes, oral presentations, RFI responses, and customer discovery.

Salary Range: $180,000.00 to $220,000.00

What You’ll Do:

• Own architecture for VA IT programs: reference architectures, integration patterns, platform decisions, and roadmaps — with clear documentation of trade‑offs.
• Write proof‑of‑concept code and hands‑on prototypes to de‑risk architectural decisions and validate solutions before they reach customers.
• Represent Credence technically to VA stakeholders (OIT, EHRM, VHA) — in RFI responses, oral presentations, and relationship‑building touchpoints.
• Contribute to capture strategy for VA opportunities — technical volume authorship, win‑theme development, technical Q&A, and customer discovery.
• Provide architectural guidance and technical mentorship to Credence engineering teams as they come into VA delivery work.
• As the practice matures, review and validate solution designs from delivery teams against Credence's architectural standards and VA compliance requirements.
• Partner with our VA practice lead on customer engagements and on positioning Credence's AI‑native capabilities for VA modernization.
• Document architectural decisions, integration contracts, and technical standards so engineering teams can execute against them with clarity.

Required Qualifications:

• Citizenshi p: US Citizen with the ability to obtain a successful Federal Background Investigation.
• Experience : Minimum ten (10) years of hands‑on technical experience. Bachelor's in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field; Master's preferred.
• AI/ML. Direct, recent, hands‑on experience using AI, Machine Learning, or Generative AI to solve real problems in production systems — not just familiarity. Examples of qualifying work: integrating LLM APIs into production systems, building RAG pipelines, designing MLOps infrastructure, fine‑tuning or training models, or architecting agentic AI systems. Candidates without demonstrable AI/ML implementation work will not be considered. AI/ML depth will be evaluated — AI/ML is core to our value proposition to VA.
• Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Experience . Prior experience working at VA — as a VA employee or as a VA contractor — is required. General federal or DoD experience does not substitute.
• Scale : Experience architecting at enterprise scale ($100M+ programs or equivalent complexity — multi‑region production cloud, platforms serving tens of thousands of users, or systems integrating 20+ downstream applications) and comfort operating at task‑order agility (bidding and delivering smaller task orders with short time‑to‑delivery).
• Cloud : Deep experience with secure cloud architecture on AWS and/or Azure — service model selection (IaaS, PaaS), networking, identity, and federal cybersecurity controls (FedRAMP, NIST).
• DevSecOps : Deep experience with DevSecOps principles and practices — CI/CD, automated testing, infrastructure as code, shift‑left security.
• Software Engineering breadth : API design, microservices, containerization, application development, Agile/SDLC.
• Federal Resources Awareness : Familiarity with Federal Government reference architectures and security controls (FedRAMP, NIST 800‑53, VA EHRM/OIT standards).
• Technical Leadership : Proven ability to set architectural direction and mentor engineers through technical credibility and hands‑on problem‑solving.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Healthcare informatics experience — VA, VHA, DoD healthcare.
• DoD program experience (delivery or capture) — our practice supports both VA and DoD customers.
• Experience with application portfolio inventories, application interdependency mapping, and modernization assessments.
• Data analytics, SaaS, Low/No‑Code platforms, or RPA.
• Network engineering depth.

Additional Requirements:

• Understanding of Agile, Service‑Oriented Architecture, DevOps, Automated Testing and Deployment, Microservices, and Containerization.
• Demonstrated experience designing and de‑risking large, complex solutions — preferably in cloud and/or container environments.

Certifications:

• Technical certifications such as AWS Solutions Architect, Azure Solutions Architect, or similar are valued but not required. Non‑technical certifications (PMP, ITIL) are not weighted.

Communication & Soft Skills:

• Excellent oral and written communication — comfortable briefing senior VA stakeholders and defending architectural decisions in technical review.
• Critical thinking and the ability to look at problems from multiple angles.
• Comfort with ambiguity and a bias toward action in a fast‑moving, capture‑driven environment.

• Health Care Plan (Medical, Dental & Vision)
• Retirement Plan (401k, IRA)
• Life Insurance (Basic, Voluntary & AD&D)
• Paid Time Off (Vacation, Sick & Public Holidays)
• Family Leave (Maternity, Paternity)
• Short Term & Long Term Disability
• Training & Development
• Work From Home
• Free Food & Snacks
• Wellness Resources