Senior Application Modernization & Migration Architect

ECS is seeking a Senior Application Modernization & Migration Architect to work remotely. 

 

The Senior Application Modernization & Migration Engineer leads enterprise initiatives to transform legacy COBOL, PL/I, CICS, DB2, IMS, VSAM, and JCL-based applications to modern distributed or cloud-ready platforms  -based mainframe applications into modern, cloud-native or cloud-enabled solutions using AI where applicable. This role combines expertise in legacy technologies, cloud engineering, AI-assisted software development, and automation to accelerate modernization while reducing risk, cost, and delivery timelines.

 

The role serves both strategic leadership and hands-on technical guidance throughout all phases of modernization, partnering with enterprise architects, engineering teams, cloud platform teams, mainframe application owners, DevSecOps, Testing teams, and business stakeholders to deliver end-to-end migration strategies that reduce technical debt, improve agility, and ensure business continuity.

Core Responsibilities

 

Modernization Strategy & Technical Leadership:

• Lead end-to-end application modernization and cloud migration initiatives.
• Assess legacy application portfolios, dependencies, and infrastructure to define target-state architectures.
• Leverage AI and automation to accelerate code analysis, dependency discovery, code transformation, documentation, testing, and migration activities.
• Define and drive migration strategies (e.g., rehost, replatform, refactor, rearchitect, replace).
• Design cloud-native and on-prem, cloud-ready solutions using microservices, APIs, event-driven architectures, containers, and serverless technologies.
• Build and implement automated CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, and testing frameworks to support modernization efforts.
• Modernize batch processing, transaction processing, and data integration while ensuring business continuity and ensuring optimization of application performance.
• Collaborate with architects, developers, business stakeholders, and infrastructure teams to deliver modernization programs.
• Establish and align engineering standards, governance, and best practices for AI-enabled software development and cloud migration with customer-mandated architecture standards and governance guidelines.
• Mentor engineering teams and provide technical leadership throughout the modernization lifecycle.
• Develop comprehensive migration planning to include dependency mapping, cutover strategies, and rollback procedures

 Application & Architecture Transformation:

• Analyze COBOL and other mainframe application-based applications, batch workloads, and business logic.
• Design modern architectures using cloud-native services, APIs, microservices, and event-driven patterns.
• Decompose monolithic systems into modular, scalable components.
• Identify and eliminate technical debt while improving maintainability and extensibility.
• Architect design to ensure application and system performance, including load testing, capacity planning, and optimization of user-response time for extremely large data sets.
• Lead technical assessments of: COBOL applications, PL/I applications, CICS transactions, Batch processing, JCL, DB2 databases, IMS databases, VSAM files, MQ messaging

Cloud Engineering & Platform Enablement:

• Support the design and implementation of secure, scalable cloud-based solutions.
• Collaborate with platform teams on infrastructure, networking, identity, security, and observability.
• Enable containerization, orchestration, and serverless architectures where appropriate.
• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure-as-code automation.
• Develop cloud-ready on-prem solutions that require minimal re-design utilizing cloud-compatible and cloud-agnostic architecture principles.

Data Modernization & Migration:

• Lead migration of legacy databases and file-based systems to modern data platforms.
• Ensure data integrity through validation, reconciliation, and quality controls.
• Develop automated data migration, transformation, and conversion processes.

Integration Modernization:

• Design APIs and integration layers to connect modern and legacy systems during transition phases.
• Transform batch processes into event-driven or service-based workflows.
• Support enterprise messaging and integration frameworks.

Quality Engineering & Validation:

• Define testing strategies across functional, integration, regression, performance, and UAT phases.
• Validate application behavior, performance, and stability post-migration.
• Troubleshoot and resolve migration-related defects and performance issues.

Governance, Risk & Documentation:

• Identify technical and operational risks and define mitigation strategies.
• Ensure compliance with enterprise architecture, security, and governance standards.
• Produce migration runbooks, architecture documentation, and operational procedures.

Salary Range: $240,000 - $260,000

General Description of Benefits

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology, or equivalent experience.
• US Citizenship
• 15+ years of enterprise application development or engineering experience.
• 7+ years working with COBOL, other mainframe-based languages, and legacy enterprise systems.
• 5+ years leading large-scale application modernization or cloud migration programs.
• Proven experience delivering complex, enterprise-wide transformation initiatives.
• Technical leadership and architectural thinking
• Strategic planning and systems analysis
• Problem-solving in complex environments
• Cross-functional collaboration
• Executive-level communication
• Risk identification and mitigation
• Mentoring and team development