Senior Azure Data Architect

Our customer is a federal agency that enforces federal law. Its attorneys and investigators decide real cases from thousands of pages of case files, exhibits and correspondence. The agency has built the platform to search that record with AI. What it needs now is one senior person who can bring new offices onto it without weakening the access model that protects the people named in those files.

This is a named Key Personnel position. You are the architect the agency's data and CIO staff will work with directly on design, and your resume is presented to the Contracting Officer for approval before you start. It is a builder's seat on a team of three: you, a Senior BI and Analytics Engineer, and a Program Manager who handles the customer, the schedule and the security writing so that your hours go to engineering.

You inherit a working stack and you build inside it. The agency operates the platform; you own what SPN builds on it.

Azure Government, with separate dev and test subscriptions and production behind an agency go decision

A governed PostgreSQL read replica fed by change data capture from the agency's case system

A dbt semantic layer and a data catalog

Approved Azure OpenAI services, a platform vector store, OCR and embedding services

Apache Superset for dashboards and AI-assisted views

A production AI Assistant with retrieval guardrails already in place

The agency's Git repositories and CI/CD runners, where all code lives from the first commit

Python: pandas, SQLAlchemy, psycopg, the Azure OpenAI SDK and test frameworks

Days 1 to 30: suitability forms filed on day one; source inventory and design for the first office; access-control design reviewed with the agency

Days 31 to 60: the first office's content extracted, chunked and embedded in dev, returning cited answers; the paired-role access test written

Days 61 to 90: AI features running inside the first product in dev; first measurement run against the agency's test set; the product ready for user acceptance testing in month 4

Zero unauthorized-access defects, proven by running the same query under paired roles before every promotion

AI quality measures at or above the thresholds agreed with the agency, for every office

No upstream change breaks a scheduled refresh without your probe raising it first

Every security control statement backed by evidence you produced

United States citizenship, and the ability to obtain a Public Trust Tier 2 determination (the agency sponsors it)

A bachelor's degree in computer science, information technology or a related field

12 or more years in technology, 8 or more of them in cloud and data architecture

Azure architecture at the level of AZ-305, by certification or by equivalent hands-on work

At least one document question-answering application with citations that you put into production, on Azure OpenAI or an equivalent

PostgreSQL or SQL Server at the level of writing row-level security policies

Python

CI/CD in GitHub Actions or Azure DevOps

An active Public Trust, Tier 4 or Secret, which can shorten the start to one to three weeks through reciprocity

CISSP or an equivalent senior security certification, or 5 or more years of security architecture

Production OCR or Azure Document Intelligence pipelines

Azure Government, pgvector or Azure AI Search

Apache Superset or another open-source BI platform, and dbt

Written NIST SP 800-53 control evidence for a Federal system