Senior Database Architect

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Join Leidos and become part of a high-impact initiative supporting a multidisciplinary team focused on delivering cutting-edge planning, operational, technical, analytical, and mission support capabilities. We're assembling a team of top-tier data professionals who are driven by curiosity, innovation, and a desire to make a meaningful impact.

Note: This position is part of a future contract opportunity pending award announcement.

The Leidos Defense Sector is seeking a highly qualified Senior Database Architect to support a multidisciplinary team dedicated to delivering innovative planning, operational, technical, analytical, and mission support capabilities in Tampa, FL.  The successful candidate will collaborate with government, military, and contractor personnel to develop solutions that enable informed decision-making, operational excellence, and mission success. Candidate must already possess a TS/SCI security clearance in order to be considered.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and maintain enterprise database architectures supporting mission applications, operational systems, analytics, reporting, and organizational data requirements.

• Develop conceptual, logical, and physical database designs that ensure data integrity, scalability, performance, availability, security, and interoperability across enterprise environments.

• Evaluate mission and application requirements to recommend appropriate relational, NoSQL, graph, document, distributed, or cloud-native database technologies.

• Develop database architecture standards, design patterns, data models, naming conventions, and technical specifications that promote consistency and interoperability across systems.

• Design database schemas, relationships, indexing strategies, partitioning approaches, storage architectures, and access patterns optimized for operational and analytical workloads.

• Develop architectures supporting high availability, replication, backup and recovery, disaster recovery, fault tolerance, and continuity of operations requirements.

• Design secure database architectures incorporating encryption, identity and access management, role-based access controls, auditing, data protection, and cybersecurity requirements.

• Collaborate with Data Architects, Database Engineers, Data Engineers, software developers, cybersecurity personnel, system architects, and mission stakeholders to translate business and operational requirements into scalable database solutions.

• Review existing database environments to identify architectural limitations, performance constraints, technical debt, security risks, and modernization opportunities.

• Develop database modernization and migration strategies supporting transition from legacy systems to cloud, hybrid-cloud, or modern enterprise data platforms.

• Support integration of databases with enterprise applications, APIs, data pipelines, analytical environments, data warehouses, data lakes/lake houses, and other information systems.

• Evaluate database performance requirements and provide architectural recommendations addressing scalability, storage, query performance, concurrency, and system availability.

• Develop technical architecture diagrams, database design documentation, data models, interface specifications, implementation guidance, and technical decision papers.

• Conduct architecture and design reviews to ensure database implementations comply with established technical standards, security requirements, and enterprise architecture.

• Evaluate emerging database technologies and recommend solutions that improve performance, scalability, resilience, security, and mission effectiveness.

• Provide technical leadership and mentoring to Database Engineers, administrators, developers, and other technical personnel on database architecture and design best practices.

Required Qualifications

Education & Experience

• Minimum of 12 years of directly related experience in database architecture, database engineering, database administration, data modeling, enterprise application architecture, or related technical disciplines.

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software Engineering, Data Engineering, Computer Engineering, Information Technology, or a related technical discipline. Additional years of directly related experience may be substituted, where permitted.

• Demonstrated experience designing complex enterprise database architectures supporting mission-critical or high-availability systems.

• Experience developing logical and physical data models and translating application or mission requirements into database architectures.

• Experience designing database solutions across on-premises, cloud, or hybrid environments.

Skills

• Extensive knowledge of relational database technologies such as PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, or comparable enterprise platforms.

• Experience with non-relational technologies such as MongoDB, Elasticsearch, Cassandra, graph databases, or comparable platforms.

• Expertise in conceptual, logical, and physical data modeling, schema design, normalization and denormalization, indexing, partitioning, and database performance principles.

• Strong understanding of database scalability, high availability, replication, backup and recovery, disaster recovery, and fault-tolerant architectures.

• Experience designing cloud-based database solutions using Microsoft Azure, AWS, or comparable enterprise cloud platforms.

• Knowledge of database security architecture, encryption, access controls, auditing, and cybersecurity principles.

• Familiarity with APIs, ETL/ELT pipelines, data integration, messaging architectures, and enterprise application integration.

• Understanding of data governance, metadata, data lineage, retention, lifecycle management, and information management principles.

• Strong analytical, architectural, troubleshooting, and technical decision-making skills.

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills with the ability to explain complex architectural concepts to technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Preferred Qualifications

• Master's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software Engineering, Data Engineering, or a related technical discipline.

• Experience supporting Department of Defense, Intelligence Community, or other national security organizations.

• Experience with Azure SQL, Amazon RDS/Aurora, Databricks, Snowflake, Microsoft Fabric, Palantir Foundry, or comparable enterprise data platforms.

• Experience designing databases supporting large-scale analytics, artificial intelligence/machine learning, real-time applications, or mission-critical operational systems.

• Experience supporting database modernization, cloud migration, or legacy system transformation initiatives.

• Familiarity with DoDAF, TOGAF, or other enterprise architecture frameworks.

• Relevant Microsoft, AWS, Oracle, PostgreSQL, Snowflake, or other database/cloud architecture certifications.

Security Clearance:

• Active TS/SCI required

* Standard day shift; schedule may be adjusted based on operational or customer requirements.

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If you're looking for comfort, keep scrolling. At Leidos, we outthink, outbuild, and outpace the status quo — because the mission demands it. We're not hiring followers. We're recruiting the ones who disrupt, provoke, and refuse to fail. Step 10 is ancient history. We're already at step 30 — and moving faster than anyone else dares.

Original Posting:

Pay Range:

The Leidos pay range for this job level is a general guideline only and not a guarantee of compensation or salary. Additional factors considered in extending an offer include (but are not limited to) responsibilities of the job, education, experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities, as well as internal equity, alignment with market data, applicable bargaining agreement (if any), or other law.