Senior Application Modernization & Migration Architect

ECS Tech Inc•Work from home, Virginia

15h•Remote

About The Position

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.

Requirements

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

Responsibilities

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.