Application Architect

About Aubrant

Aubrant Digital is a leader in multi-shore custom application development. We are passionate about solving our clients’ business problems through consultative teamwork, innovative software, and proven processes. We’ve served more than 50 clients and delivered hundreds of high quality, custom enterprise applications. Our clients value us as integral team members who get the job done on time and on spec, and we are proud of our high client retention rate and under 2% staff turnover. With offices in New Jersey, Boston, Costa Rica, and Eastern Europe, we execute the full software lifecycle, from architecture and design through development, QA and application maintenance & support. Our company culture emphasizes client service, trust-based relationships, and innovation.

Position: Application Architect

Job description

As an Aubrant Application Architect, you will shape the application architecture on several client engagements at once. Our clients are mid-size and large enterprises, many in regulated industries. A typical engagement modernizes legacy applications, builds new features, and connects them to a modern cloud data platform, often with AI features on top. Most engagements are already underway when you join, stepping into work in motion, and guiding to a sound target without interrupting delivery.

Your scope runs from the data serving layer through APIs and services to the user interface. A few engagements are new builds on a clean cloud foundation. Most are hybrid, with decades-old systems that must keep running while you replace them. You will split your time across two or three clients and move between them as their needs change.

This is a technical leadership role. You lead through architecture decisions, design reviews, standards, and working prototypes, and you present options directly to client technology leaders. Program management and staffing sit with the engagement lead.

What qualifications make you an Aubrant Application Architect?

• You think across the full stack. You design from the user interface to the database and don't push complexity from one tier onto another.
• You lead through technical authority. Engineers trust your calls because you have built systems yourself and can explain why each decision is right.
• You design for data you don't own. You know how to build applications on top of a data platform, with clear contracts between the two: versioned data products from the curated layer, the platform's master identifiers instead of your own, and an application that is itself a clean source for the platform.
• You model the domain before the tables. You start from business concepts and bounded contexts, map them to the enterprise data model, and only then design stores and APIs.
• You handle hybrid and legacy environments. Modernization is rarely a clean lift-and-shift. You design transitional architectures that keep the business running.
• You shape architecture in motion. You join work that is already underway, respect what the team has built, and move it toward the target state in steps the business can absorb.
• You explain architecture in business terms. You turn technical trade-offs into cost, risk, timeline, and capability.
• You prove designs with working code. You build prototypes and proofs of concept, not only diagrams.
• You switch context well. You can hold several client architectures in your head and give each one full attention when it needs it.
• You bring order to ambiguity. Documentation is often thin. You find the facts, set priorities, and make the path clear.

Responsibilities

Application architecture and design

• Define target-state application architectures across front end, mobile, APIs and services, integration, application data stores, and cloud infrastructure.
• Assess applications already in development, name the decisions that are still open, and steer them to the target state without interrupting delivery.
• Choose architecture styles that fit the problem: modular monolith, microservices, event-driven, or serverless.
• Design domain APIs and event contracts, including API gateway, versioning, and asynchronous messaging patterns.
• Write architecture decision records (ADRs), reference architectures, and roadmaps that engineering teams build against.

Data-driven applications

• Design applications that treat a governed lakehouse Gold layer as the system of record. Know the split between analytical serving (Delta tables, Databricks SQL) and operational serving (Azure SQL, Cosmos DB), including change data capture feedback loops and eventual consistency.
• Pick the right serving store per use case: relational for transactions, NoSQL for low-latency reads, analytical stores for reporting. Present each option with its run cost and operating burden, and choose the smallest footprint that meets the need.
• Work with data architects and modelers on master data, golden records, and the contracts that keep applications decoupled from platform internals: versioned Gold schemas, schema evolution, master identifiers, and how an application shows current versus point-in-time history (SCD Type 2) and handles golden-record merges.
• Design applications as good citizens of the data platform: emit clean, well-keyed operational data for change data capture, take reference data from the curated layer instead of forking it, and manage schema changes to operational stores with the ingestion pipelines in mind.Design embedded analytics and AI features, including how models are called and monitored from applications.

Legacy modernization

• Assess legacy applications: code, dependencies, data access, performance, and integration points.
• Pick a strategy per application (rehost, re-platform, re-architect, or retire) and sequence the work to limit business risk.
• Design hybrid and transitional architectures, such as the strangler fig pattern, so old and new systems run side by side until cutover.

Security, compliance, and engineering standards

• Build in identity, role-based access, secrets management, and encryption from the first design.
• Design for regulated data, including PII and health information, in line with each client's compliance regime.
• Set standards for CI/CD, containers, infrastructure as code, observability, and automated testing.

Technical leadership and client engagement

• Lead design reviews and set coding and API standards for client and Aubrant engineering teams.
• Co-author design decisions with the client's engineers and record them as ADRs in the client's own repositories and backlog, so every decision is traceable and nothing is delivered that the client team did not take part in.Mentor senior engineers on architecture patterns and cloud practices.
• Build proofs of concept that test risky decisions before full development starts.
• Present options and recommendations to client technology leaders, and support Advisory on pre-sales solutioning and estimates.
• Add the patterns you build to the Studio's shared catalog so the next engagement starts further ahead.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, software engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• Professional working proficiency in written and spoken English.
• 10+ years of professional software engineering, with at least 5 years as a solutions or application architect.
• Full-stack architecture experience: modern front ends (React, Angular, or similar), mobile apps, RESTful APIs, microservices, and event-driven systems.
• Hands-on depth in at least one enterprise stack, with .NET (C#, ASP.NET Core) strongly preferred. Java, Node.js, or Python experience is a plus.
• Deep Microsoft Azure experience: App Service, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Azure Functions, API Management, Event Grid or Service Bus, Azure SQL, Cosmos DB, and Entra ID.
• Experience building applications on a lakehouse data platform (Delta Lake or Iceberg, medallion tiers, change data capture, master data management), including serving stores and APIs over curated Gold data.A record of modernizing legacy applications, including .NET Framework or Web Forms, with patterns such as strangler fig and phased re-platforming.
• Hybrid architecture across cloud and on-premises: identity federation, data synchronization, and network connectivity.
• Security architecture: zero trust, identity and access management, encryption, and handling PII in regulated settings.
• Working knowledge of CI/CD, containers, and infrastructure as code (Terraform, Bicep, or ARM templates).
• Performance and observability: load testing, caching, capacity planning, and Application Insights or equivalent.
• Clear communicator with executives and engineers alike. Aubrant is a client-facing consultancy, and you will work directly with client leadership.
• Able to run two or three engagements at once and stay effective when requirements are unclear.
• Experience joining engagements already in progress and advising an in-house engineering team part-time.
• Domain modeling: domain-driven design, bounded contexts, and mapping an application's domain model to a canonical enterprise model before committing to tables or APIs.
• Working knowledge of lakehouse and data platform concepts (Delta Lake or Iceberg, medallion tiers, change data capture, master data management) is a plus.
• Experience with Azure Databricks, Azure Synapse, Microsoft Fabric, or Microsoft Purview from the application side is a plus.
• Experience building AI-enabled applications, such as calling and monitoring ML models (MLflow or Azure Machine Learning) and retrieval-augmented generation, is a plus.
• Working experience on AWS or Google Cloud in addition to Azure is a plus.
• Experience with IoT, telematics, or other high-volume event and streaming data is a plus.
• Experience in regulated industries such as healthcare, life sciences, financial services, logistics, or the public sector, including HIPAA, SOC 2, or PCI DSS, is a plus.
• Power BI embedded analytics and row-level security experience is a plus.
• Experience using AI coding tools within a governed software delivery process, with human review and decisions the client can trace, is a plus.
• Azure certifications, such as Azure Solutions Architect Expert or Azure Developer Associate, are a plus.