Knowledge Engineering Associate Director

Accenture•Chicago, IL

About The Position

The Associate Director is the technical owner of Accenture’s Code Archaeology discipline within its Digital Core Reinvention practice. The role owns the evidence-first discovery methodology, archaeology tooling and knowledge graph pipelines, language-coverage roadmap, and the technical point of view presented to clients and the market. The work focuses on examining enterprise code and processes before transformation, including large, legacy estates, so that modernization decisions are based on evidence. The role leads methodology development and governance across five discovery domains, their correlation, and the handoff from discovery to architecture. It also guides the standardization and productization of reusable assets and ensures major engagements consume or contribute to the asset portfolio. As the discipline’s public technical voice, the Associate Director presents at conferences, participates in client architecture councils, and leads technical thought leadership. Travel may be required and can vary from 0% to 100% based on business needs and client requirements.

Requirements

At least 12 years of enterprise software engineering experience, including significant brownfield modernization at multi-million-line-of-code scale.
At least 3 years leading large-scale architectural discovery or modernization engagements, including at least one engagement where the candidate was the named technical owner and can discuss it in detail.
At least 5 years of working fluency with knowledge graphs and ontology modeling, as well as static analysis, dependency analysis, and Git history mining.
At least 2 years of hands-on experience with LLM-assisted code analysis.
At least 3 years leading the development, commercialization, or ongoing evolution of a productized offering, platform, or reusable methodology, with direct accountability for its roadmap, adoption, or business outcomes.
Bachelor’s degree or equivalent work experience (minimum 12 years); candidates with an associate’s degree must have at least 6 years of work experience.
Demonstrated ability to earn the confidence of client executives through technical depth.
A clear and defensible point of view on the current AI frontier and the ability to articulate it publicly.

Nice To Haves

Published or spoken on AI-augmented code analysis, code archaeology, or software architecture recovery.
Experience with retrieval-augmented generation over code corpora and agent context engineering.
Fluency in mainframe-era languages such as COBOL or PL/I alongside modern technology stacks.
Comfort being outranked in pipeline conversations and having a deciding technical vote.
A track record of editing methodology in an iterative, engineering-oriented manner.
Relationships with frontier AI partners such as Anthropic, OpenAI, hyperscaler AI organizations, or equivalent.

Responsibilities

Own the evidence-first discovery methodology, including the five discovery domains, cross-domain correlation, and discovery-to-architecture handoff.
Define the scope and boundaries of Code Archaeology engagements and defend the methodology against technical and business scope drift.
Own archaeology tooling, knowledge graph pipelines, and the language-coverage roadmap, including mainframe-era languages.
Ensure every major engagement consumes or contributes to the asset portfolio.
Determine which assets should be standardized and productized.
Serve as the public technical voice of the discipline through conference presentations, client architecture councils, and technical thought leadership.
Shape and communicate the market perspective on why code and process excavation should precede transformation.