Your role and responsibilities
As an Application Architect specializing in Hybrid Cloud Management, you will manage the overall application system, ensuring seamless interactions between components. You will establish technology standards, translate business objectives into technology standards, and select/define/enforce consistent products, vendors, methodologies, and standards.
Your primary responsibilities will include:
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Define Technology Standards: Establish and enforce technology standards, ensuring consistency across the application system, and translating business objectives into actionable technology plans.
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Manage Application Support: Ensure application support, performance, availability, and scalability, while maintaining the functional interface to the application infrastructure.
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Enforce DevOps Methodologies: Apply your knowledge of DevOps methodologies to ensure seamless interactions between components and efficient application delivery.
Required education
Bachelor's Degree
Preferred education
Master's Degree
Required technical and professional expertise
Pre Requirements:Government of Canada Security Clearance is a requirement for this role. You must be eligible to obtain Secret, NATO and Controlled Goods Clearances
1. Must be either a Canadian Citizen or Canadian Permanent Resident
- Must have resided in Canada for a minimum of 10 consecutive years, without leaving Canada (for any reason) for more than 30 days at a time OR traveling abroad to any non-NATO countries for any period.
- Must have a clean criminal and credit history
This role involves examination, possession or transfer of controlled goods and technology as defined under the Canadian Controlled Goods Program and ITAR data/technology. To be eligible for employment in this role, you must be a Canadian citizen or Canadian Permanent Resident. Canadian citizens and permanent residents must be security assessed under the Canadian controlled goods program. 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 following countries in order to be eligible for employment in this role: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom, United States of America. All applicants will also be required to undergo an additional security assessment conducted by an IBM designated Controlled Goods Program official as a condition of employment.
This role is onsite in Ottawa, Ontario only.
Role SummaryWe 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.
Key Responsibilities• 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, DevSecOps) 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.
Required Qualifications- 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.
Preferred technical and professional experience
- Experience in defense, 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 behavior, and correctness.
OTHER RELEVANT JOB DETAILS
Must have the ability to work in Canada without sponsorship.
This role will involve working with technology that is covered by Export Regulations sanctions. If you are a Foreign National from any of the following US sanctioned countries (Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, and the Crimea, Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhia regions of Ukraine) on a work permit, you are not eligible for employment in this position.
This role involves examination, possession or transfer of controlled goods and technology as defined under the Canadian Controlled Goods Program and ITAR data/technology. To be eligible for employment in this role, you must be a Canadian citizen or Canadian Permanent Resident. Canadian citizens and permanent residents must be security assessed under the Canadian controlled goods progr am. If you hold dual or third nationality, in addition to being either a Canadian citizen or Canadian Permanent Resident, the nationality must not be from any of the following countries in order to be eligible for employment in this role: Afghanistan, Belarus, Cambodia, Central African Republic, China (PRC) (including Hong Kong), Cuba, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Haiti, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Myanmar (Burma), Nicaragua, North Korea, Russia (including occupied Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk), Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan, Syria, Venezuela, Zimbabwe. All applicants will also be required to undergo an additional security assessment conducted by an IBM designated Controlled Goods Program official as a condition of employment.
