Application Architect

Zelis • St. Louis, MO

2d • $139,000 - $176,700 • Hybrid

About The Position

At Zelis, we Get Stuff Done. Zelis is modernizing the healthcare financial experience across payers, providers, and healthcare consumers. We serve more than 750 payers, including the top five national health plans, regional health plans, TPAs and millions of healthcare providers and consumers across our platform of solutions. Zelis sees across the system to identify, optimize, and solve problems holistically with technology built by healthcare experts – driving real, measurable results for clients. At Zelis, AI is woven into the fabric of how we work. Every associate is expected - and empowered - to partner with AI to challenge the status quo, accelerate innovation, and amplify their impact. This is a place for builders with a growth mindset who act with agility, embrace change, and use modern technology to shape smarter solutions, exceptional experiences, and the future of our industry for our clients, customers, and our culture. Zelis Healthcare seeks a highly experienced, hands-on Application Architect to play a key role in driving the modernization of our platform within the Platform Engineering organization – Core Business Services. This role will partner closely with engineering leadership to define and execute a strategy to evolve our technology from a monolithic architecture to a scalable, cloud-native platform. This individual will not only help shape the technical vision but will actively contribute to its execution. Working across multiple engineering pods, this role will embed with teams to design, build, and deliver critical components—helping decompose core systems, modernize our payments and communications platforms, and establish scalable patterns using AWS and cloud-native technologies. The ideal candidate brings deep expertise in distributed systems, API design, and platform engineering, along with a pragmatic approach to driving incremental, business-aligned transformation. They will lead by example—writing code, contributing to system design, and guiding teams through complex technical challenges while introducing best practices for containerization, CI/CD, observability, and resilient system design. Operating in a highly secure, high-volume, 24x7 transactional environment, this role will influence architecture and elevate engineering practices across the organization. While this is not a people management role, it requires strong leadership through influence—mentoring engineers, partnering with engineering managers, and helping teams adopt modern development approaches, including AI-enabled engineering workflows. Success in this role requires a balance of strategic thinking and hands-on execution, with the ability to turn long-term architectural vision into tangible progress. This individual will be instrumental in accelerating our platform transformation by building alongside teams, improving developer experience, and enabling scalable, sustainable growth.

Requirements

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with significant hands-on development in backend systems and distributed architectures
• Proven experience actively contributing to the decomposition of monolithic applications into microservices or modular architectures
• Must have experience with AWS and cloud-native development (compute, storage, networking, and managed services)
• Demonstrated ability to design and build scalable APIs, event-driven systems, and platform services
• Experience with containerization (e.g., Docker) and modern deployment practices (CI/CD pipelines)
• Track record of influencing technical direction across multiple teams without direct authority
• Strong communication skills with the ability to drive alignment through practical, actionable guidance
• Ability to balance long-term architectural vision with hands-on execution and incremental delivery

Nice To Haves

• Experience leading or contributing hands-on to large-scale cloud migrations or platform modernization initiatives
• Familiarity with container orchestration platforms (e.g., Kubernetes, ECS) and infrastructure-as-code practices
• Development experience helpful using C# or Java
• Experience working on payments platforms or other high-scale transactional systems
• Exposure to communications platforms (messaging, notifications, real-time systems, physical print production)
• Experience building shared platforms, internal developer tooling, or enabling “paved road” solutions
• Familiarity with AI-assisted development tools or integrating AI capabilities into engineering workflows or products
• Background in platform engineering, developer experience, or multi-team enablement at scale
• Experience operating in regulated and/or high-availability environments

Responsibilities

• Partner with engineering leadership to define and execute an application modernization strategy, evolving from a monolithic architecture to scalable, cloud-native services
• Contribute directly to the design and development of critical components across engineering pods, including APIs, services, and shared platform capabilities
• Lead the decomposition of core systems into modular, service-oriented or event-driven architectures
• Embed with teams to guide and implement best practices for building, deploying, and operating services in AWS (containers, CI/CD, observability, resilience)
• Establish and standardize patterns for APIs, reusable engines, and platform services to enable consistency and scale
• Identify and drive incremental modernization opportunities that reduce risk while delivering measurable business value
• Mentor engineers and engineering managers through hands-on collaboration, design reviews, and pairing
• Partner cross-functionally with product, platform, and operations teams to align technical direction with business priorities
• Champion modern development practices, including AI-enabled engineering workflows (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, Cursor), to improve developer productivity

Benefits

• 401k plan with employer match
• flexible paid time off
• holidays
• parental leaves
• life and disability insurance
• health benefits including medical, dental, vision, and prescription drug coverage

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed