Application Architect

IBM
IBM

IT

Ottawa, ON, Canada

Posted on Aug 27, 2026
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.

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:

• Define Technology Standards: Establish and enforce technology standards, ensuring consistency across the application system, and translating business objectives into actionable technology plans.

• Manage Application Support: Ensure application support, performance, availability, and scalability, while maintaining the functional interface to the application infrastructure.

• 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

  1. 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.
  2. 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 Summary

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.

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.

ABOUT BUSINESS UNIT

IBM Consulting is IBM’s consulting and global professional services business, with market leading capabilities in business and technology transformation. With deep expertise in many industries, we offer strategy, experience, technology, and operations services to many of the most innovative and valuable companies in the world. Our people are focused on accelerating our clients’ businesses through the power of collaboration. We believe in the power of technology responsibly used to help people, partners and the planet.

YOUR LIFE @ IBM

In a world where technology never stands still, we understand that, dedication to our clients success, innovation that matters, and trust and personal responsibility in all our relationships, lives in what we do as IBMers as we strive to be the catalyst that makes the world work better.

Being an IBMer means you’ll be able to learn and develop yourself and your career, you’ll be encouraged to be courageous and experiment everyday, all whilst having continuous trust and support in an environment where everyone can thrive whatever their personal or professional background.

Our IBMers are growth minded, always staying curious, open to feedback and learning new information and skills to constantly transform themselves and our company. They are trusted to provide on-going feedback to help other IBMers grow, as well as collaborate with colleagues keeping in mind a team focused approach to include different perspectives to drive exceptional outcomes for our customers. The courage our IBMers have to make critical decisions everyday is essential to IBM becoming the catalyst for progress, always embracing challenges with resources they have to hand, a can-do attitude and always striving for an outcome focused approach within everything that they do.

Are you ready to be an IBMer?

ABOUT IBM

IBM’s greatest invention is the IBMer. We believe that through the application of intelligence, reason and science, we can improve business, society and the human condition, bringing the power of an open hybrid cloud and AI strategy to life for our clients and partners around the world.

Restlessly reinventing since 1911, we are not only one of the largest corporate organizations in the world, we’re also one of the biggest technology and consulting employers, with many of the Fortune 500 companies relying on the IBM Cloud to run their business.

At IBM, we pride ourselves on being an early adopter of artificial intelligence, quantum computing and blockchain. Now it’s time for you to join us on our journey to being a responsible technology innovator and a force for good in the world.

IBM is proud to be an equal-opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, pregnancy, disability, neurodivergence, age, or other characteristics protected by the applicable law. IBM is also committed to compliance with all fair employment practices regarding citizenship and immigration status.

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.
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