Principal Application Modernization Engineer - Remote Eligible

Principal Application Modernization Engineer

At Liatrio, we don't just ship software — we enable real transformation. We help large enterprises break free from legacy systems and truly enable AI across their organizations. We design and deliver secure, scalable, agentic AI-native platforms that reshape how teams build, deliver, and thrive at scale.

We live this every day by embedding deeply with clients to drive meaningful AI enablement — accelerating modernization, reducing risk, and creating lasting competitive advantage through production-grade AI systems. We use tools like Claude, Cursor, and Windsurf daily to move faster and deliver better outcomes. If you're a technical leader who leads with AI and drives lasting change, this is where you belong.

What You'll Do

Technical Ownership and Architecture

• Define the scope of technical work related to deliverables and milestones of the engagement
• Own the architectural direction of your workstream — making key technical decisions, documenting tradeoffs, and ensuring the team is building toward something coherent and maintainable
• Responsible for code quality, architecture, and technical direction across the team
• Write and review production code across the stack — your technical judgment sets the bar, and you're in the work alongside the team
• Integrate AI and LLM capabilities into client applications — designing the architecture for agentic workflows, RAG pipelines, intelligent automation, and AI-augmented developer tooling, and guiding your team through implementation
• Anticipate technical risk before it becomes delivery risk — surface issues early, define mitigation strategies, and communicate proactively
• Participate in scoping discussions and SOW architecture for new and existing customers
• Generate ideas, be willing to fail fast, and demonstrate with POCs
• Drive knowledge sharing in and out of client engagements

Client Technical Engagement

• Serve as the senior technical point of contact for your workstream — engaging directly with client engineering managers and directors on architecture, delivery strategy, and technical risk
• Build trusted relationships with client technical leaders
• Proactively identify opportunities to improve engineering practices and technical quality at the client, and drive that change
• Participate in business development including client expansion conversations and SOW development

Team Leadership and Development

• Responsible and accountable for the technical outcomes of your team
• Write monthly feedback for all engineers on your workstream in collaboration with the Delivery Lead
• Mentor engineers through real technical challenges — pairing on hard problems, reviewing architecture decisions, giving feedback that raises their game
• Organize and break down complex work so the team can execute with clarity
• Share responsibility for the morale and well-being of the Liatrio team on your engagement

Experience and Skills

Engineering and Architecture

• You have a track record of owning the architectural direction of complex workstreams in enterprise environments — you've made the hard technical calls, been accountable for the outcomes, and learned from the experiences that didn't go as planned
• You've modernized large legacy applications in real enterprise environments — you understand the strangler fig pattern, incremental refactoring, and event-driven decomposition as practical strategies you've applied under real constraints
• You're fluent across the full delivery stack — frontend, backend, APIs, data, cloud infrastructure — with genuine depth in multiple areas
• You've designed and delivered cloud-native, distributed systems at enterprise scale — microservices, event-driven architectures, API gateways, async messaging — and you understand the failure modes and operational complexity that comes with them
• You've operated in large enterprise environments with multi-cloud setups, complex organizational structures, and legacy constraints — and you know how to deliver meaningful progress despite them
• You can hold the technical bar for an entire workstream — reviewing architecture, reviewing code, catching problems early, and developing engineers through the process
• You have enough knowledge of platform engineering, infrastructure as code, cloud-native platform adoption — whether that's Kubernetes, managed container services, or other orchestration platforms depending on client environment — and DevOps practices to make good architectural decisions and speak credibly to the engineers responsible for the platform

AI and Intelligent Systems

• You've built or integrated AI capabilities — you understand the full picture from integration through deployment, observability, and the ongoing work of keeping AI-powered features reliable
• You can have a credible conversation with client technical leaders about where AI creates genuine leverage — grounded in what's real

Requirements

• 8+ years of hands-on software engineering experience, with demonstrated ownership of complex technical workstreams
• Must be authorized to work in the United States or Canada without sponsorship
• Travel availability: 25-50% depending on client needs

Specifics

• Full benefits including unlimited PTO, funded HSA option, 401k match, monthly LiveWell stipend, and quarterly company bonus
• Annual base salary: $170,000 - $200,000 depending on experience