Principal Application Architect (AWS Modernization)
Location: Schaumburg, IL (Hybrid – 2 Days Onsite / 3 Days Remote)
About the Role
We are seeking a Principal Application Architect to help lead the modernization and evolution of our core SaaS platform. This is not a traditional cloud infrastructure, DevOps, or enterprise architecture role. We are looking for a software engineer turned architect who enjoys solving complex technical challenges, partnering closely with development teams, and helping guide the long-term direction of a growing software platform.
The ideal candidate has a strong software development background and has progressed into architecture leadership. You should be comfortable reviewing code, mentoring engineers, driving technical design discussions, and leading modernization initiatives across a large-scale application environment.
This role will play a key part in helping evolve a legacy PHP-based platform while designing modern AWS-native solutions and guiding the gradual adoption of service-oriented and cloud-native architectures.
What You''''''''ll Do
- Lead the modernization of a large-scale SaaS platform and help define its future architectural direction.
- Partner closely with software engineers to design scalable, maintainable, and secure application architectures.
- Review code, technical designs, and implementation approaches to ensure alignment with architectural standards.
- Drive decomposition of legacy applications into modern service-oriented or microservices-based architectures.
- Identify technical debt and create practical modernization roadmaps.
- Design and implement AWS-based application architectures that support scalability, reliability, and security.
- Collaborate with Product, Engineering, and Leadership teams to align technology decisions with business objectives.
- Mentor developers and help establish engineering best practices.
- Evaluate existing systems and recommend improvements to performance, maintainability, and operational efficiency.
- Support architectural decisions across APIs, integrations, databases, messaging systems, and cloud-native services.
Required Qualifications
- 10+ years of software engineering, application architecture, or platform engineering experience.
- Strong software development background in PHP, .NET, Java, Node.js, or similar backend technologies.
- Experience designing and building large-scale business applications.
- Experience modernizing legacy applications and reducing technical debt.
- Experience working directly with software engineering teams on architecture, design, and implementation decisions.
- Experience designing APIs, distributed systems, and service-oriented architectures.
- Hands-on experience with AWS and cloud-native application development.
- Strong understanding of software design patterns, scalability, security, and application performance.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience modernizing PHP-based applications.
- Experience working within .NET environments.
- Experience with microservices, event-driven architectures, and domain-driven design.
- Experience with containerized workloads using ECS, Fargate, Docker, or Kubernetes.
- Experience with AWS services such as API Gateway, Lambda, ECS, Fargate, SQS, SNS, EventBridge, DynamoDB, Aurora, and CloudWatch.
- Experience building modernization strategies and migration roadmaps for SaaS platforms.
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