Cloud Data Architect (Contingent)

Description
About the Role:
Wilcore is hiring a Cloud Data Architect to support an enterprise cloud-based data and analytics platform for a federal health agency. The platform provides governed data storage, engineering and analytics tools, platform integrations, and policy controls for data practitioners across the enterprise, and supplies the technical foundation for component data platforms managed by other parts of the agency.
In this role you will establish and continuously steward enterprise platform architecture, security baselines, and Authority to Operate-aware provisioning across the platform and its component platforms, so that teams build on governable, interoperable, and cost-effective designs.
Contract Contingency Notice:This position is contingent upon contract award. Employment offers will be extended only upon successful contract award and client approval. Candidates may be considered and interviewed in advance to support rapid onboarding should the contract be awarded.
What You'll Be Doing
Set a Policy-First Foundation: Establish and operate clearly documented rules and guardrails around security, compliance, identity and access, data handling, and application design that drive consistent, governed behavior for platform teams and customers.
Publish the Enterprise Blueprint: Create and maintain the enterprise reference architecture, roadmap, and policies spanning the platform and its component platforms, with clear guardrails for lakehouse tiers, approved consumption patterns, cross-platform integration, and identity and access architecture.
Standardize Designs and Data Management: Define authoritative reference patterns, interfaces, and guardrails aligned with Zero Trust Architecture principles and ATO considerations. Set platform-wide data management standards — medallion, lineage, catalogs, open formats — for consistent lakehouse operations.
Define and Operate Interoperability: Specify identity, networking, and trust models for on-premises and third-party interconnections. Document approved connection patterns and maintain boundary diagrams and Ports, Protocols, and Services Management documentation for approved system interconnections.
Operate Architecture Governance: Run Architecture Review Boards, capture Architecture Decision Records, and maintain a Register of Exceptions, keeping decisions traceable to the enterprise reference architecture and visible across cloud platforms.
Provide Solution Architecture: Deliver architectural guidance and cloud cost estimates for customer initiatives and evaluate additions to platform capabilities when needed.
Plan and Govern Hosting Transitions: When authorized, provide design and risk guidance on identity, networking, resiliency, cost and performance, and ATO impacts for hosting transitions, integrating decisions into the enterprise reference architecture and compliance artifacts.
Manage ATO and Change-Driven Security: Execute Risk Management Framework-aligned ATO activities to sustain confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Govern Security Impact Analysis through intake and review workflows, recording approved designs and mappings before implementation.
Set Observability and DevSecOps Standards: Establish platform-wide observability and auditability requirements and DevSecOps practices. Define logging, metrics, and trace schemas, retention and routing, SLO and SLA monitoring, and incident playbooks. Require secure CI/CD with quality gates, code scanning, and secrets management.
Ensure Data and Model Parity: Operate and improve the platform's delta lake patterns and dedicated pool usage, ensuring parity of data and models migrated from other platforms before customer release.
Coordinate Across Platforms: Coordinate with experts across other agency data platforms to align modeling, metadata, and analytics approaches with component platforms, legacy warehouse data architecture, and domain subject-matter experts.
Optimize Cloud Cost and Performance: Monitor resource provisioning and utilization and provide visual reports, projections, and automated flags when costs increase, to support FinOps-informed decisions through a FinOps Dashboard.
What You'll Bring
Azure Data Environments: Azure Government and Azure Commercial, should also be familiar with Databricks
Architecture and Compliance Documentation: Demonstrated expertise managing and documenting technical architecture, security and compliance strategies, and data platform engineering.
Relevant Disciplinary Expertise: Expertise in the disciplines and technical areas related to the platform architecture, security, and compliance tasks described above.
Requirements
Applicants must be authorized to work in the United States.
Must be able to obtain and maintain a federal Public Trust (Tier 2 / Moderate Risk) background investigation.
Must reside and perform all work within the continental United States.
Production system monitoring and support coverage runs 7:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. Eastern Time, with participation in a 24/7 on-call escalation process for urgent issues.
This position is contingent upon contract award.

Work arrangement
No