Senior Application Architect; Modernization & Delivery Enablement

Senior Application Architect – The Senior Application Architect leads the design and modernization of mission‑critical enterprise applications, partnering with business and technology stakeholders to define scope, translate requirements into implementable architecture, and guide delivery into production. This role establishes modernization patterns and architectural guardrails, drives dependency‑aware solution design, and mentors engineering teams to deliver secure, scalable, and maintainable platforms across legacy, hybrid, and cloud environments.

This position is only open to candidates located in Georgia. You must reside in the state of Georgia or be willing to relocate to Georgia. This role is not open to sponsorship.

• Conduct deep‑dive assessments of legacy applications including code quality, architecture patterns, dependencies, SLAs, and operational pain points.
• Evaluate modernization options (refactor, replatform, rehost, replace, retire) and document decision rationale.
• Develop end‑to‑end target‑state architecture blueprints covering application layers, integration flows, data movement, security zones, and operational models.
• Partner with Enterprise Architecture to ensure alignment with enterprise modernization standards, cloud strategy, and long‑term platform evolution.
• Identify modernization risks, constraints, sequencing challenges, and provide mitigations based on business criticality and technical feasibility.
• Define transitional architectures for phased modernization to ensure business continuity and controlled cutover.
• Translate business and technical requirements into solution designs, covering data schemas, integration contracts, workflow sequencing, and API specifications.
• Create and maintain architecture artifacts such as logical/physical diagrams, sequence diagrams, deployment diagrams, and service interaction maps.
• Partner closely with engineers and product owners during backlog refinement, sprint planning, and development cycles to ensure alignment with architectural direction.
• Validate that engineering implementations follow design patterns, security requirements, performance expectations, and reliability objectives.
• Advise teams during production readiness assessments, ensuring observability, scaling, capacity, and fallback mechanisms are in place.
• Support troubleshooting during testing cycles (functional, performance, integration) and guide teams through complex technical decision‑making.
• Define API lifecycle standards including versioning, schema evolution, authentication/authorization models, and developer portal documentation.
• Architect event‑driven solutions including domain event definitions, message payload standards, retention policies, and event replay requirements.
• Evaluate integration platforms, messaging brokers, and streaming technologies for suitability in modernization efforts.
• Ensure consistency in API and event design across teams through reusable patterns, governance reviews, and automated quality checks.
• Establish monitoring and tracing practices to improve supportability and operational insight.
• Champion architecture standards and best practices; lead design reviews, prevent architectural drift, and provide guidance on performance, resilience, and maintainability.
• Rapidly prototype modernization options to validate architecture assumptions, quantify performance, or evaluate new patterns.
• Develop proof‑of‑concepts that de‑risk complex integration or modernization challenges before full‑scale delivery.
• Collaborate with partners and vendors to review proposed architectures, ensuring alignment with enterprise standards and long‑term maintainability.
• Drive technical evaluation criteria for vendor tools and platforms, assessing scalability, extensibility, API maturity, and ease of integration.
• Ensure vendor‑delivered artifacts—designs, code, documentation—meet architectural expectations before acceptance.
• Provide one‑on‑one and team‑level mentorship to engineers and junior architects, strengthening modernization and design skills.
• Conduct code reviews with focus on architectural consistency, performance tuning,…