Director, Solutions Architecture & Sales Engineering

About Aleut Federal:

At Aleut Federal, we believe the company and its mission is just as important as the job you are applying for. Aleut Federal is an Alaskan Native-owned enterprise whose purpose is to support our “Shareholders,” the Unangax, the indigenous people of the Aleutian Islands of Alaska. People are at the core of everything we do. We support our Shareholders by providing excellent service and quality results to our Clients, the various branches of the federal government. We engage in our local markets, so community service is embedded into our process.

Our culture nurtures the strength of our workforce through mentorship and coaching, providing opportunities for growth, and competitive benefits. We support and encourage diversity, inclusion, and accountability at every level.

The Aleut Federal motto is “We are One” because we truly believe that with one heart, one mind, and one purpose, we can accomplish our mission and be an organization anyone would be proud to be a part of.

Position Summary:

Aleut Federal is seeking a Director of Solutions Architecture & Sales Engineering to lead the technical function that wins and validates our federal work. This is a player-coach role. You will own the team, its operating model, and its resource strategy — and you will still be the architect in the room on our most consequential pursuits, hands on the keyboard, building the reference architecture and the prototype yourself.

The team spans the full spectrum of federal solutions architecture: cloud and infrastructure modernization, data platforms and analytics, cybersecurity and Zero Trust, application and platform engineering, and enterprise IT services. AI and agentic systems are the anchor discriminator — the capability that differentiates Aleut Federal in the market — and this leader is expected to carry that depth personally, not delegate it.

The role operates across the full lifecycle: opportunity shaping and technical solutioning, through capture, proposal development, and pricing, into post-award delivery assurance. You will directly influence technical win strategies while remaining accountable for whether what we sold can actually be built.

This is a build, sell, validate, and lead role. If you want to stop building, this is the wrong seat. If you only want to build, this is also the wrong seat.

Core Responsibilities:

Team Leadership & Talent Development

• Lead, manage, and develop a team of 3–6 solution architects and sales engineers — setting technical standards, career paths, and performance expectations.
• Establish the operating model for the function: how pursuits are intaken and triaged, how architects are assigned, what artifacts are produced at each gate, and how quality is reviewed before anything reaches a customer or a proposal.
• Coach the team in customer-facing technical delivery — architecture sessions, demos, whiteboarding, and executive briefings — and raise the bar on how the team communicates technical value.
• Build and defend the hiring plan: identify capability gaps, define labor categories and skill profiles, and recruit against them.
• Serve as the technical escalation point for the team; unblock hard architecture and feasibility questions rather than routing them elsewhere.

Resource Management & Capacity Strategy:

• Own resource allocation across a portfolio of concurrent pursuits — decide where architect capacity goes, and make the tradeoff calls when demand exceeds supply.
• Forecast technical solutioning demand against the BD pipeline and align capacity to the pursuits that carry the highest expected value, not the loudest internal request.
• Build the utilization and prioritization framework: bid/no-bid technical inputs, level-of-effort estimation for solutioning work, and clear criteria for when the team engages versus declines.
• Manage matrixed and partner capacity — pull delivery SMEs, OEM/ISV resources, and teaming partner architects onto pursuits when the internal team is the wrong or insufficient answer.
• Track and report the function's contribution: pursuits supported, technical win rate, cost of solutioning, and where capacity constraints are costing the company opportunities.

Technical Strategy Development:

• Develop and maintain Aleut Federal's technical solution strategy — which capabilities we invest in, which we partner for, and which we decline, mapped against agency demand signals and our competitive position.
• Build and own the reusable asset portfolio: reference architectures, solution patterns, demo environments, prototypes, and accelerators that shorten pursuit cycles and improve consistency.
• Define and maintain the technology partner and OEM strategy in coordination with BD and delivery leadership — cloud providers, AI/ML platforms, data and security vendors.
• Advise executive leadership on emerging technology direction, investment priorities, IR&D focus, and the capability roadmap needed to compete on target IDIQs and recompetes.
• Translate strategy into practice: make sure the standards, patterns, and partner positions actually show up in the proposals and the delivered work.

Growth, Sales Engineering & Solutioning (Hands-On):

• Personally lead technical solutioning on the highest-value and highest-complexity pursuits — including AI-based opportunities spanning generative AI and LLM-enabled applications, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), agentic workflows, AI-enabled automation, and decision support systems.
• Define technical discriminators and win themes, lead customer-facing technical discussions, and translate capability into measurable mission, operational, and economic outcomes.
• Partner with Business Development and Capture to shape opportunities pre-RFP and strengthen competitive positioning.
• Present and defend solution approaches to technical, mission, and executive stakeholders — including in orals.

AI-Enabled Engineering (Required, Hands-On):

• Aleut Federal expects AI to be a core engineering and delivery capability in this role, not a theoretical specialty or a management responsibility handed to someone else.
• Deep practical experience with agentic systems is required: multi-step reasoning and task orchestration, tool-using agents that interact with APIs, enterprise systems, retrieval layers, workflow engines, and external services, and human-in-the-loop execution models.
• Design and implement systems with guardrails, fallback logic, validation layers, escalation controls, memory and context handling, and clear tradeoff decisions between prompting, retrieval workflows, deterministic orchestration, and true agentic execution.
• Ensure AI systems are secure, governable, auditable, and aligned to Zero Trust, federal security expectations, privacy constraints, responsible AI practices, hallucination mitigation, and output validation requirements.
• Set the standard for the team: define what “good” looks like for AI architecture at Aleut Federal and hold the team's work to it.

Note on qualification: Candidates whose AI experience is limited to coursework, vendor training, demos, sandboxes, prompt-only work, or theoretical architecture without delivered implementation are not qualified for this role. We are looking for someone who has shipped.

Capture, Proposal, & Pricing:

• Own the technical solution across the proposal portfolio — assign section authors, review for compliance and persuasiveness, and personally author the anchor technical sections on priority bids.
• Author complete technical sections including solution architecture, AI/model and retrieval strategy, agentic workflow design, security and governance model, and implementation approach.
• Build and review BOEs aligned to engineering effort, data preparation and integration, infrastructure and model access cost, transition, and sustainment.
• Serve as the technical voice in pricing and price-to-win discussions — ensure the proposed solution is executable at the proposed price.
• Ensure solutions are compliant, executable, secure, and clearly differentiated.

Delivery Assurance & Technical QA:

• Ensure alignment between proposed architectures and delivered implementations across the portfolio; own the handoff from capture to delivery.
• Provide technical oversight during prototype-to-production transition, data integration, retrieval setup, model integration, and workflow deployment.
• Identify and mitigate risks related to hallucinations, output reliability, data leakage, access control, workflow instability, latency, cost, governance gaps, and auditability.
• Feed delivery lessons back into the reference architectures and BOE assumptions so the next bid is better than the last.

Technical Marketing, Thought Leadership & Industry Engagement:

• Develop solution briefs, use cases, and capability messaging across the portfolio, with AI as the leading edge.
• Represent Aleut Federal at industry events, executive discussions, customer briefings, demos, and technical forums — and speak credibly on agentic systems, production AI architecture, and responsible AI in federal environments.
• Develop the team as visible technical voices in the market, not just internal resources.
• Position Aleut Federal as a credible delivery partner — not just an advisory brand.

Required Qualifications:

• S. Citizenship (U.S. Citizens only).
• 10+ years of U.S. federal technology experience with a Bachelor's degree, including 3+ years leading technical teams (direct management or formal team lead with performance accountability).
• Demonstrated hands-on experience designing and implementing production or production-grade systems — this is a technical leadership role, not a management-only role.
• Demonstrated hands-on experience with one or more of: LLM applications, RAG architectures, agentic systems, or AI-enabled workflow automation.
• Breadth across enterprise solutions architecture — cloud, data, security/Zero Trust, and application or platform engineering.
• Experience owning technical solutioning, capture, proposal development, and customer-facing technical engagements in the federal market.
• Experience managing resource allocation and competing priorities across concurrent pursuits or programs.
• Ability to obtain a Position of Public Trust.

Prefered Qualifications:

• Experience building or scaling a solutions architecture or sales engineering function in a federal services or GovCon environment.
• Experience delivering AI systems in production federal or enterprise environments.
• Experience implementing agentic workflows with tool use, orchestration, and human oversight.
• Experience with secure AI deployment, monitoring, and governance; FedRAMP and ATO pathway familiarity.
• Experience with IDIQ, GWAC, and task-order capture at scale.
• Experience with OEM/ISV partner and alliance strategy.
• Active Top Secret clearance.

Certifications (Desired, Representative of Level):

• AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional or AWS Certified Machine Learning – Specialty
• Microsoft Azure Solutions Architect Expert or Azure AI Engineer Associate
• Google Professional Cloud Architect or Professional Machine Learning Engineer
• CISSP or comparable security certification
• Relevant cloud, data, or MLOps certifications aligned to implementation depth

Position Profile Summary:

• Player-coach — leads the team and stays hands on the keyboard
• Owns resource strategy, capacity allocation, and technical direction
• Broad solutions architecture footprint with AI and agentic systems as the anchor discriminator
• Growth-driven, with direct and measurable impact on technical wins
• Production-oriented, not theoretical
• Delivery accountable — owns whether what we sold can be built
• Mission-aligned and operationally credible in federal environments

Salary Range:

• $190,000 -- $260,000 (annually)

Closing Date:

• We will accept applications until 11/1/26

Benefits:

Aleut offers the following benefits to eligible employees:

• Health insurance
• Dental/Vision insurance
• Paid Time Off
• Short- and Long-Term Disability
• Life insurance
• 401k and match

EEO Statement:

Aleut Federal, LLC provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, or genetics. In addition to federal law requirements, AF complies with applicable state and local laws governing nondiscrimination in employment in every location where the company has facilities. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation, and training. AF prohibits workplace harassment based on race, color, sex, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, genetic information, disability, or veteran status.

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