Lead Drupal Architect/Developer

Description

Title: Lead Drupal Architect/Developer

Location: Remote

Terms: Full-time

Salary: $135-165k DoE

Clearance: Public Trust

Travel: 0%

Position Description

We are seeking an experienced Drupal Architect/Developer to design, develop, secure, and deploy the Drupal 11 CMS backend for a public-facing federal agency website.

The role will work closely with the AWS Cloud Architect, frontend developers, security team, content administrators, and agency stakeholders to deliver a secure, scalable, accessible, and maintainable Drupal platform integrated with a modern React/Next.js frontend in AWS GovCloud. The Drupal Architect will help define the hosting and deployment architecture, establish secure connections among Drupal, databases, storage, caching, search, APIs, and the frontend, and implement infrastructure and application configuration through approved DevSecOps processes.

The ideal candidate has significant prior experience deploying Drupal 11 in a regulated cloud environment, preferably AWS GovCloud, supporting the federal ATO activities.

Responsibilities: 

• Design and implement the Drupal 11 CMS architecture for a high-availability, public-facing website.
• Configure Drupal content types, taxonomies, workflows, roles, permissions, moderation, publishing, and editorial features.
• Develop custom Drupal modules, services, plugins, event subscribers, and integrations.
• Configure and secure Drupal JSON:API, GraphQL, or other APIs used by the React/Next.js frontend.
• Define backup, recovery, logging, monitoring, scaling, and disaster-recovery requirements.
• Identify and remediate application and infrastructure security risks.
• Provide technical information and evidence required for the ATO process.
• Coordinate deployment, testing, release management, and production support.
• Collaborate with the AWS Cloud Architect on deployment architecture, networking, storage, databases, caching, logging, monitoring, backups, and disaster recovery.
• Deploy and operate Drupal in AWS GovCloud using approved services and containerized or automated deployment patterns.Integrate Drupal with PostgreSQL, object storage, caching services, search platforms, CDN services, and external APIs.
• Ensure that unpublished, restricted, and administrative content is not exposed through APIs, search indexes, caches, or frontend applications.
• Implement secure Drupal administration, authentication, authorization, session management, and administrative access controls.
• Review and manage Drupal modules, Composer dependencies, PHP libraries, and third-party integrations.
• Establish Drupal coding standards, development practices, branching strategies, and release procedures.
• Support CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, code reviews, vulnerability remediation, and controlled production releases.
• Optimize Drupal performance, caching, database queries, API responses, and media delivery.
• Support content migration, data modeling, integration testing, performance testing, and production readiness activities.
• Develop technical documentation, deployment procedures, configuration guides, data-flow diagrams, and operational runbooks.
• Support security assessments, vulnerability remediation, ATO documentation, and continuous-monitoring activities.
• Troubleshoot application, integration, performance, deployment, and production issues.
• Mentor Drupal developers and promote maintainable, reusable, and secure solutions.

Requirements

• U.S. Citizenship and ability to obtain and maintain a Federal Public Trust clearance.
• 7+ years of Drupal development experience, including architecture and production deployments.
• Demonstrated experience with Drupal 9, 10, or 11; direct Drupal 11 experience in AWS cloud environment is strongly preferred.
• Strong experience with PHP, Symfony, Composer, Twig, Drupal APIs, configuration management, and custom module development.
• Experience designing Drupal content models, taxonomies, editorial workflows, permissions, and moderation processes.
• Experience with decoupled or headless Drupal implementations.
• Experience integrating Drupal with React, Next.js, JSON:API, GraphQL, or similar frontend technologies.
• Experience with integrating with AWS managed database service (RDS/PostgreSQL or MySQL) and database backed React applications.
• Experience deploying Drupal using containers, automated pipelines, or infrastructure-as-code environments.
• Working knowledge of AWS managed cloud services and cloud deployment concepts.
• Experience with Drupal security updates, dependency management, secure configuration, access control, and vulnerability remediation.
• Experience with automated testing, code review, version control, and CI/CD practices.
• Experience supporting public-facing, high-traffic, or mission-critical websites.
• Ability to create technical documentation and communicate effectively with technical and nontechnical stakeholders.

 Desired

• Experience supporting federal agencies, government contractors, FedRAMP environments, or ATO activities.
• Experience with accessibility requirements, including Section 508 and WCAG.
• Prior experience deploying Drupal in AWS GovCloud or another regulated cloud environment.
• Experience integrating Drupal with Amazon Bedrock and AI-enabled chatbot/search.
• Experience with AWS services such as ECS/Fargate, Aurora or PostgreSQL, S3, CloudFront, ElastiCache, OpenSearch, WAF, and Secrets Manager.
• Experience with automated Drupal security and quality tools.
• Acquia, Drupal or relevant professional certifications.