Principal Application Modernization Architect

About the Role:

The Principal Application Modernization Architect is one of the most senior technical roles at Liatrio. You are accountable for the strategic technical direction of major engagements — setting the architectural vision, shaping how we engage, and ensuring that what we deliver creates lasting change for our clients.

You are the person in the room who sees the full picture — the technical debt, the organizational dynamics, the business constraints, and the path forward — and can articulate that clearly to a CTO or Chief Architect while simultaneously guiding a team of engineers to execute against it. You earn trust at the executive level by being right, being credible, and delivering.

What You'll Do:

Enterprise Technical Strategy and Architecture

• • Set and own the architectural direction for major client engagements — defining the modernization strategy, target architecture, sequencing, and guardrails that keep delivery aligned to business outcomes

  • Partner with the Strategic Principal to shape SOWs, working directly with C-suite, CTO, CIO, and Chief Architect stakeholders to align technical strategy with organizational goals

  • Lead architectural design across one or more technical domains — full-stack application development, cloud-native platforms, AI integration — and evolve Liatrio's point of view as the industry changes

  • Architect enterprise solutions that reduce technical debt while balancing constraints of time, budget, risk, and organizational readiness — and communicate those tradeoffs clearly to executive stakeholders

  • Anticipate where engagements are heading before others do — surfacing risks, identifying opportunities, and proactively shaping strategy before problems become crises

  • Participate in scoping discussions and SOW architecture for new and existing customers

Client Relationship and Influence

• • Build and maintain deep, trusted relationships with CTO, CIO, Chief Architect, and VP-level technical stakeholders — the kind of relationships where clients call you before making major technical decisions

  • Guide clients through complex, politically charged modernization efforts — removing organizational impediments, building consensus across competing stakeholders, and keeping transformation on track when it gets hard

  • Share industry insight, anticipate technology shifts, and position Liatrio as a forward-thinking partner

  • Influence organizational culture and engineering practices at client organizations, helping them build the internal capabilities to sustain transformation after Liatrio is gone

Delivery Oversight and Technical Leadership

• • Provide technical oversight across multiple workstreams — accountable for the quality, coherence, and strategic alignment of everything your team delivers

  • Integrate AI and LLM capabilities into client modernization strategies — agentic workflows, intelligent automation, AI-augmented engineering — ensuring those capabilities are production-grade and maintainable

  • Guide and collaborate with both Liatrio and client architects and engineers, elevating the technical quality of the engagement as a whole

  • Support the sales team in client expansion conversations and validate the technical feasibility of proposed work

  • Leverage Liatrio's accumulated insights to create accelerators, methodologies, and intellectual property that benefit future engagements

Team and People Leadership

• • Accountable for the morale, well-being, and technical growth of the Liatrio team on your accounts

  • Coach and mentor engineers and leads through 1:1s, real-time feedback, and formal reviews — with a focus on growing the next generation of technical leaders at Liatrio

 

Experience and Skills:

Architecture and Engineering:

• • You've owned the full modernization lifecycle at enterprise scale — assessing a complex legacy estate, making the architectural case for change to skeptical executives, and seeing it through to delivery in organizations that don't change easily

  • You have architectural range across the full technology stack — frontend, backend, data, infrastructure, cloud, and platform — with genuine depth in multiple areas

  • You've navigated the hardest parts of enterprise modernization: tightly coupled monoliths, shared databases, organizational silos, regulatory constraints, and teams that have built the same system for years — and you've found a way forward without burning everything down

  • You can look at a large, complex codebase or architecture and quickly develop a credible assessment — identifying the risk areas, the leverage points, and the sequence of changes that create momentum without creating chaos

  • You have deep expertise in cloud-native architecture and you've led large organizations through the cultural and technical transformation required to actually operate that way — including cloud-native platform adoption, or other orchestration platforms depending on client environment

  • You've worked in regulated industries and you understand what it means to modernize in environments where security, compliance, and operational risk are non-negotiable

AI and Intelligent Systems:

• • You've built or integrated AI capabilities— LLMs, agentic workflows, RAG pipelines, or AI-augmented developer tooling — and you understand the architecture, the failure modes, and what it actually takes to keep these systems working reliably

  • You can have a credible conversation with a client's executive team about where AI creates genuine leverage in their modernization journey — cutting through the hype, grounding the discussion in what's real, and helping them think through a practical path forward

  • You have enough hands-on depth to evaluate approaches, guide your team's implementation decisions, and recognize when something that sounds good in theory isn't going to hold up in production

Requirements:

• • 10+ years of hands-on software engineering and architecture experience, with significant time in senior technical leadership roles at the enterprise level

  • Proven track record as a trusted technical advisor at the CTO, CIO, or Chief Architect level

  • Must be authorized to work in the United States or Canada without sponsorship

  • Travel: 10-20%, primarily US-based with occasional international travel