“For I am the Lord who heals you.”EXODUS 15:26 · RAPHA, HEBREW: TO HEAL
Fifteen years of federal cloud engineering. Twelve years of TechRapha. One standard.
One Accountable Principal
John Saad founded TechRapha in 2014 and remains its principal engineer. B.S. in Computer Engineering from Virginia Tech. Fifteen years building and securing systems for federal agencies at Hewlett-Packard, Booz Allen Hamilton, SAIC, ECS Federal, and Accenture Federal Services, and for the medical practices and communities where TechRapha began.
He serves on the board of FOCUS North America, a national service nonprofit, and advises Agora University on its technology. When you email john@techrapha.com, he’s the one who answers.
Certifications
Education
The Résumé
Where the principal has worked, and for whom. Individual experience, listed as such: TechRapha’s own contracts are on the past performance page.
2014 – present
Founder & Principal Engineer
Founded as a side practice for medical practices and nonprofits; full time since October 2024. Cloud, security, identity, and AI engineering for HHS agencies, the IRS, DLA Energy, and a federal acquisition platform.
2020 – 2024
Cloud Architect Delivery Manager
Joined through the Novetta acquisition. Led cloud security, monitoring, and automation delivery, and scaled platform operations across 100+ AWS accounts with Terraform, Terragrunt, and Git-driven CI/CD.
2019 – 2020
Cloud Architect
Led workload migration to AWS with phased cutovers from on-premises, and built the infrastructure automation and runbooks that carried operations after handoff.
2018 – 2019
Senior Systems Engineer
Designed an enterprise key-management architecture on AWS KMS and led IAM and PKI modernization for certificate services, with automated issuance and auditable admin workflows.
2015 – 2018
Cloud & Systems Engineer
Legacy-to-AWS migrations for defense workloads, the DevOps backbone for a large software program, and intelligence visualization modernization alongside analysts.
2011 – 2015
Lead Technical Consultant
Solution design through deployment for federal and Fortune 500 clients: enterprise automation and monitoring frameworks, and an early private-cloud self-service provisioning portal on HP Helion.
The Transition
2014
John founded TechRapha while working in federal cloud engineering, to serve the medical practices and churches that big consultancies never see. The first clients ran on paper charts and aging PCs. Records went into real systems, networks got built, sites went online, and from year one a paid project funded a free one for a community that could not pay.
2015 – 2023
By day: cloud migrations, DevSecOps, and identity for defense, intelligence, and civilian agencies at Booz Allen, SAIC, ECS, and Accenture Federal Services. After hours: TechRapha, the IT partner for Northern Virginia medical practices. Paper charts became EMR systems, offices got HIPAA-conscious networks and hosting, and nonprofits got the same care at no charge. In 2022 New York City's Office of Technology & Innovation became the first government client. In 2023 the practice work became a product: PatientPro, patient review automation wired into practice EMRs, built, run, and retired on our own terms in 2026.
2024 – today
In 2024 the federal work started arriving as TechRapha subcontracts: cloud and identity engineering for two HHS agencies and a migration for the IRS. That October John left Accenture Federal Services to run the firm full time. Since then: principal engineer on ProcureIQ, ASI Government's federal acquisition platform, which grew from three modules to a licensed suite of eight, a DLA Energy deployment on Google Cloud, an 8(a) application filed, and the first prime proposals submitted.
Twelve years in. Same standard.