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