AWS Application Architect (local onsite Chicago candidates ONLY)

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.