Principal Systems Architect (Hybrid Infrastructure)

Location: San Diego, California, United States preferred; customer engagement and site visits are required as applicable, with the final onsite/hybrid schedule and travel to be confirmed. Willingness to relocate to San Diego is preferred.

Salary: $145,546–$180,875 per year; actual offer depends on skills, qualifications, experience, and location.

Company

hirify.global delivers mission-driven technology and infrastructure services, including work supporting the Department of Veterans Affairs.

What you will do

• Advise SES, C-level, and technology leaders on infrastructure strategy, modernization, technical risk, service performance, and recommended actions.
• Design and review current- and target-state architectures across data centers, cloud, compute, networks, storage, operating systems, virtualization, containers, applications, and identity.
• Develop and review infrastructure-as-code, scripts, APIs, orchestration workflows, reusable Golden Paths, deployment pipelines, testing, rollback, monitoring, and configuration updates.
• Translate customer needs into technical and nonfunctional requirements, acceptance criteria, platform dependencies, application interfaces, and release-readiness plans.
• Investigate cross-layer failures and bottlenecks; improve scalability, observability, capacity, reliability, recovery, and operational support using SRE practices.
• Lead solutions from discovery and prototyping through integration, testing, authorized deployment, sustainment, technical governance, mentoring, and operational handover.

Requirements

• 15+ years of progressively responsible systems or infrastructure engineering experience, including 5+ years as a systems architect, solution architect, principal engineer, or technical lead; the periods may overlap.
• Experience participating in implementation and production support, not solely consulting recommendations or project administration.
• Recent hands-on experience designing, implementing, automating, and troubleshooting hybrid infrastructure, including scripts, configuration, infrastructure-as-code, APIs, and deployment pipelines.
• Substantial enterprise data center experience and experience with at least one major cloud platform; working knowledge of compute, operating systems, virtualization, containers, networking, storage, databases, backup, and disaster recovery.
• Practical experience investigating performance or availability issues and improving scalability, observability, capacity, and recoverability.
• Experience supporting application hosting and development teams and integrating application, security, and identity requirements; working knowledge of ICAM, authentication, authorization, federation, privileged access, and human/nonhuman identities.
• Experience advising C-level or equivalent senior Government leaders, with strong executive presentation, technical writing, workshop facilitation, interpersonal, and cross-organizational influence skills.
• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, information technology, information systems, or a related discipline, or an allowable equivalent combination of education and experience.
• Ability to meet Government suitability, training, and access requirements, obtain a Tier 2 / Moderate Risk Public Trust and VA PIV credential, and participate in required customer/site engagements.

Nice to have

• San Diego-area residence or willingness to relocate; VA SES/OIT advisory experience; federal or regulated-enterprise delivery; multi-provider service integration; service catalog and ITSM/CMDB integration; FinOps-informed architecture; and reusable automation or platform engineering practices.
• Cloud architecture, systems engineering, SRE, networking, security, or automation certifications.

Culture & Benefits

• Mission-driven work supporting initiatives that improve lives, with transparent and supportive leadership.
• Remote working options, paid time off, paid holidays, military leave, and learning, training, certification, and tuition reimbursement opportunities.
• Healthcare benefits, Healthcare Savings Account, Flexible Savings Account, paid life insurance, short-term and long-term disability coverage, and Employee Assistance Program.
• 401(k) match and opportunities for internal mobility.
• Employment conditions, final onsite/hybrid schedule, travel, access requirements, and compensation details remain subject to confirmation by HR and Contracts.