Application architect, IT​/Tech, Systems Engineer

Introduction

A career in IBM Consulting is built on long-term client relationships and close collaboration worldwide. You’ll work with leading companies across industries, helping them shape their hybrid cloud and AI journeys. With support from our strategic partners, robust IBM technology, and Red Hat, you’ll have the tools to drive meaningful change and accelerate client impact. At IBM Consulting, curiosity fuels success.

You’ll be encouraged to challenge the norm, explore new ideas, and create innovative solutions that deliver real results. Our culture of growth and empathy focuses on your long-term career development while valuing your unique skills and experiences.

We are seeking an Application Architect to define, evolve, and safeguard the architecture of large legacy systems operating in constrained, high‑assurance environments.

This role focuses on application structure, interaction patterns, and architectural integrity – bridging legacy systems and modern engineering practices without breaking operational guarantees. You will work closely with systems engineers, software engineers, and technical leadership to ensure applications remain understandable, evolvable, and verifiable, while acting as a mentor and collaborator with developers and team members at various levels.

Must be eligible for Canadian Controlled Goods Clearance and at least Canadian Reliability Clearance, preferably Canadian Secret: NATO. This role will involve working with technology that is covered by Export Regulations sanctions. To be eligible for employment in this role, you must be a Canadian citizen or Canadian Permanent Resident. If you hold dual or third nationality, in addition to being either a Canadian citizen or Canadian Permanent Resident, the nationality must be from one of the below approved countries to be eligible for employment in this role:
Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America. This role is onsite in Ottawa, Ontario only.

Master's Degree

• Define and maintain application architectures for complex, long‑lived systems.
• Analyze and refactor legacy application structures to recover design intent and constraints.
• Establish clear boundaries, responsibilities, and interaction patterns between components.
• Guide application evolution while preserving correctness, performance, and operational behaviour, e.g. performance optimization, capacity planning, and scalability.
• Review designs and implementations for architectural consistency and technical debt.
• Support interface definition, message flows, and integration across platforms.
• Contribute to architectural documentation (views, rationale, trade‑offs).
• Support modernization efforts (tooling, automation, CI, Dev Sec Ops ) where appropriate.
• Provide leadership to mentor and guide developers and team members across varying experience levels to foster technical growth and architectural understanding.
• Collaborate with clients, providing expert advice and recommendations on architectural strategies and modernization paths.
• Ensure designs meet security standards and comply with regulatory and standards requirements relevant to high‑assurance environments (e.g., NIST guidelines).
• Assess technical investigations, cost‑benefit trade‑offs, and impact analysis for architectural changes to ensure informed decision‑making.

• Degree in Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or equivalent experience.
• Strong experience designing and evolving software application architectures.
• Proven ability to reason about large codebases and long‑lived systems.
• Experience working legacy systems and incremental modernization.
• Strong understanding of modularity, layering, and architectural trade‑offs.
• Ability to read and reason about production code (e.g., C++, Ada, Python).
• Clear technical communication skills.

• Experience in defence, aerospace, safety‑critical, or regulated environments.
• Familiarity with message‑based architectures and interface‑driven design.
• Experience guiding teams through refactoring and architectural recovery.
• Interest in architectural modelling, system behaviour, and correctness.

• Architect real systems with real constraints, not greenfield demos.
• High technical ownership and influence over architectural direction.
• Work closely with senior systems and software engineers.
• Opportunity to shape how architecture is practiced – not just documented.
• Direct impact on client success by advising and guiding modernization strategies.