Modernization Architect

Job Description

Who you will work with: As a Senior Principal at Slalom, you will help clients accelerate large scale technology transformation by turning decades-old mainframe code into agile, cloud-native systems. This role blends deep systems understanding of z/OS with modern cloud, DevOps, and AI-assisted engineering practices. You’ll work across multiple domains, from code analysis and business-logic extraction to automated refactoring and re-platforming helping enterprises transition mission-critical workloads to hyperscaler infrastructure.

What you will do:

• Understand, extract and document business logic from mainframe applications.
• Modernize and refactor legacy code using automated transformation tools and AI coding agents.
• Reimagine monolithic systems into cloud-native microservices and event-driven architectures.
• Build, containerize, and deploy workloads to AWS (or other hyper scaler platforms).
• Prototype modernization accelerators and proof-of-concepts using LLMs, code analysis tools, and custom pipelines.
• Collaborate with architects, operators, and data engineers to ensure secure and efficient modernization patterns.

What you will bring:

• Hands-on experience developing or operating on IBM mainframes (z/OS).
• Proficiency in one or more mainframe languages: COBOL, PL/I, HLASM, JCL, etc.
• Knowledge of z/OS fundamentals: CICS, DB2, VSAM, batch scheduling, system utilities.
• Experience deploying workloads to a major cloud provider (AWS, Azure, or GCP).
• Experience leveraging LLMs and coding agents in software development workflows.
• Strong prototyping and POC development capability in dynamic environments.
• Thrives in fast-moving, collaborative and entrepreneurial teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• Familiarity with Code-as-Data and structured intermediate representation (IR) concepts.
• Experience parsing or analyzing source grammars (ANTLR4, Tree-Sitter, recursive descent, etc.).
• Experience with modernization frameworks such as AWS Blu Age or AWS Mainframe Modernization (Transform for z/OS).
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, IaC (CloudFormation/Terraform), and container orchestration (Kubernetes/OpenShift).
• Understanding of legacy data integration (DB2, VSAM, IMS) with modern cloud data stores.
• Experience designing automated test harnesses for workload equivalence validation.
• Awareness of enterprise security and IAM frameworks (RACF, IAM roles, encryption-at-rest/in-transit).
• Experience fine-tuning or prompting code-centric LLMs (e.g., Amazon Q Developer, Bedrock, Claude) for code translation, documentation, or rule extraction.
• Understanding of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) patterns, vector databases, and agentic orchestration for code analysis pipelines.
• Consulting or systems-integration experience.