789-Senior Contracts Specialist - Military veterans preferred

Position:  789-Senior Contracts Specialist Type:  Full Time Location:  Arlington, Virginia

The US Air Force Human Resources (HR)/Talent Management (TM) community is executing a digital transformation that requires rapid, adaptive, migration of legacy system capabilities to modern commercial cloud service offerings.  The intention of the migration is to achieve specified value-centric business outcomes.  “Value,” in this sense, is proportional to the utility delivered by cloud service offerings, and inversely proportional to both cost of, and time-to-deploy, that cloud service utility.  “Utility” refers both to both HR/TM functionality per se, and the service model that makes administration of the underlying information technology transparent to the customer.  Success of this HR/TM digital transformational initiative requires skillfully adaptive application of government procurement laws, regulations, processes, and practices in ways specifically aligned with the strategy explained above. 

 Duties:

• Apply deep understanding of the letter and intent of US Government, DoD, and USAF procurement language, regulations, and policies in ways that streamline bureaucracy and optimize workflows and business models associated with all procurement/sustainment efforts.
• Apply deep understanding of commercial best practices for procurement of software generally, and cloud services in particular, to inform application of procurement laws and regulations in ways that streamline bureaucracy and optimize workflows and business models associated with procuring and sustaining commercial cloud services.
• Collect data and employ analytical tools to develop and apply models that predict lifecycle cost-benefit profiles of candidate commercial cloud service options. 
• Conduct outreach to, and negotiations with, vendors of cloud service offerings in order to obtain best value with respect to utility-delivered, cost, and initial and continuing time-to-value.
• Manage and track activity across multiple cloud service evaluation projects in order to validate and verify requirements satisfaction, and to optimize use and re-use of procurement vehicles and software licenses.
• Work with government PMOs and contract shops to identify program elements, cross-program efficiencies, and acquisition strategies that are optimally aligned with digital transformation strategy and tactics.
• Prepare systems requirements documents (SRD) that explain which USAF requirements have been validated and verified as fully satisfied by procurement of a particular commercial cloud service offering. 
• Prepare acquisition handoff packages that streamline and facilitate follow-on procurement of demonstrated off-the-shelf capabilities, including e.g.: SRDs, risk management framework artifacts, documentation of market research and trades analysis, source selection criteria and methods, test results, documentation for sole source Justification and Authorization (J&A), etc.

 Requirements

• Five years’ experience as a government Contract Officer or commercial contract specialist working with or for federal government clients.
• Five years’ experience as a commercial IT contract specialist supporting software procurement by commercial firms.
• Professional experience procuring commercial cloud service offerings
• Professional experience and/or professional qualifications as a project manager, chief architect, and/or chief engineer for software-intensive projects, with emphasis on Agile methods. 
• Bachelor of Science degree in a technical field. before the requisition will be posted.