M365 Messaging and Identity Architect

Why AIS?

When you join AIS, you’re joining a mission-driven team that’s passionate about making a difference. You’ll work on projects that matter, alongside industry-leading experts, in an environment that fosters innovation, driving client success, and empowering our team to make a lasting impact. As an employee-owned company, we value collaboration, inclusivity, continuous growth, and shared success.

• Employee Ownership: Your contributions directly impact the company’s success, and you share in its achievements.

• Continuous Learning: Access to resources, training, and mentorship to support your professional growth.

• Inclusive Culture: A workplace where diversity is celebrated, and everyone’s voice is valued.

• Mission-Driven Work: Engage in projects that make a meaningful difference for our clients and communities.

What are we looking for?

At AIS, we're looking for more than just skills - we're looking for driven individuals who are passionate about making a difference, eager to grow, and aligned with our core principles.

Working@AIS

• Core Knowledge & Skills: Architects scalable, resilient solutions; authors roadmaps and blueprints; integrates diverse components; advances automation (PowerShell/Python/Ansible) and governance/policy.

• Work & Complexity: Leads architectural initiatives, establishes performance benchmarks, integrates systems at scale, researches emerging tech, and mitigates enterprise risk.

• Quality & Independence: Ensures integrity, scalability, and cost/performance optimization; produces comprehensive design artifacts; sets and enforces standards with broad autonomy.

• Teamwork & Communication: Leads architectural teams, builds strategic partnerships, institutionalizes knowledge management, and communicates designs and executive‑ready reports.

• Consulting & Engagement: Delivers architectural consulting aligned to business strategy, proposes enterprise technologies, nurtures vendor alliances, and seeds new project opportunities.

Project Summary

AIS is seeking a Microsoft 365 Messaging and Identity Architect to lead the design and governance of enterprise messaging, hybrid identity, and migration solutions across Microsoft 365 environments on a federal contract. This role is responsible for defining architecture, guiding implementation strategy, resolving complex cross-platform dependencies, and ensuring messaging and identity solutions align with security, compliance, operational, and business requirements.

Key Responsibilities

• Define end-to-end architecture for Exchange Online, Exchange Hybrid, and hybrid identity solutions in enterprise Microsoft 365 environments.

• Lead architectural planning for messaging modernization initiatives, including tenant onboarding, hybrid coexistence, cloud migrations, tenant-to-tenant transitions, and archive strategies.

• Develop architecture patterns for Exchange Online integration with on-premises Exchange, Microsoft Entra ID, identity synchronization services, mail hygiene platforms, and enterprise security controls.

• Design hybrid mail flow, authentication, namespace, routing, and coexistence strategies that support business continuity and phased migration execution.

• Establish migration strategies, wave planning frameworks, readiness criteria, cutover models, rollback approaches, and post-migration stabilization guidance for enterprise-scale programs.

• Evaluate and define target-state architectures for identity and messaging services, including synchronization scope, authentication dependencies, directory hygiene, object governance, and access control alignment.

• Lead technical assessments of current-state environments and translate findings into architectural recommendations, decision papers, roadmaps, and implementation guidance.

• Provide architectural oversight for complex issues involving mail routing, hybrid connectivity, directory synchronization, client authentication, legacy dependencies, and service interoperability.

• Partner with security and compliance stakeholders to ensure messaging and identity architecture aligns with regulatory obligations, audit expectations, retention requirements, and enterprise protection standards.

• Define engineering standards, design principles, reference architectures, and implementation guardrails for messaging and hybrid identity services.

Required For This Opportunity

• 10+ years of experience in Microsoft messaging, identity, and enterprise infrastructure architecture.

• Microsoft 365 Certified: Administrator Expert (MS-102) Certification

• Identity and Access Administrator Associate (SC-300) Certification

• Deep expertise in Exchange Online and Exchange Hybrid architecture for large or complex environments.

• Strong experience with Exchange Server in support of coexistence, hybrid dependencies, recipient management, and legacy messaging integration.

• Strong experience with Active Directory and multi-domain and multi-forest scenarios.

• Advanced knowledge of Microsoft Entra ID, hybrid identity architecture, Entra Connect / Azure AD Connect, authentication models, and identity lifecycle dependencies.

• Proven experience architecting and guiding enterprise messaging migrations, including hybrid migrations, large-scale mailbox moves, tenant transitions, or coexistence programs.

• Advanced understanding of mail flow architecture, including SMTP routing, connector strategy, DNS dependencies, namespace planning, message hygiene, and secure relay patterns.

Nice to Have Skills

• Experience in highly regulated, security-sensitive, or large enterprise environments.

• Experience with Microsoft Purview compliance capabilities as they relate to Exchange retention, archive strategies, eDiscovery, and governance.

• Familiarity with adjacent Microsoft 365 workloads such as Teams, SharePoint Online, and collaboration security as they intersect with identity and messaging design.

• Experience with third-party migration tools, mail hygiene platforms, SMTP relay services, or tenant consolidation programs.

• Experience establishing operational support models, service transition plans, and governance controls for Microsoft 365 messaging and identity services.

• Relevant Microsoft certifications in Microsoft 365, Azure, Identity, Security, or Architecture disciplines.

Applied Information Sciences does not discriminate on the basis of race, national origin, religion, color, gender, sexual orientation, age, disability, protected veteran status, or any other basis. Employment decisions are based solely on qualifications, merit, and business needs.