Cloud Principal Architect - Application Innovation

Who We Are

At Kyndryl, we run and reimagine the mission-critical technology systems that drive advantage for the world's leading businesses. We are at the heart of progress; with proven expertise and a continuous flow of AI-powered insight, enabling smarter decisions, faster innovation, and a lasting competitive edge. For our people-Kyndryls-that means doing purposeful work that powers human progress. Join us and experience a flexible, supportive environment where your well-being is prioritized and your potential can thrive.

The Role

Role Overview:

We are seeking a Cloud Principal Architect - Application Innovation to lead strategic cloud transformation initiatives for enterprise customers, with a strong focus on application modernization. This is a senior, customer-facing leadership role requiring deep expertise across pre-sales, solutioning, architecture, and delivery oversight.

The ideal candidate combines strong business and consultative skills with hands-on technical depth across cloud landing zone design, reusable module development, DevOps, cloud migration, and modernization. This individual will engage with executive and technical stakeholders, shape complex transformation programs, define target-state architectures, support sales pursuits, and provide architectural leadership through delivery.

This role is best suited for a senior practitioner who can bridge strategy, sales, architecture, and execution while driving measurable business outcomes for customers.

Key Responsibilities

Pre-Sales and Customer Engagement

• Partner with sales, account teams, and customer stakeholders to shape cloud and application modernization opportunities.
• Lead discovery workshops, architecture assessments, and solution discussions with business and technical audiences.
• Translate customer goals, pain points, and business priorities into compelling transformation roadmaps and solution proposals.
• Support RFPs, RFIs, bids, proposals, effort estimation, statements of work, and executive presentations.
• Act as a trusted advisor to customers, building strong relationships with CIOs, CTOs, enterprise architects, engineering leaders, and delivery teams.
• Present solution vision, target architectures, value cases, and transformation strategies to senior client stakeholders.

• Define end-to-end architecture for cloud transformation and application modernization engagements.
• Design enterprise landing zones aligned with security, governance, compliance, networking, identity, observability, and operational best practices.
• Architect modernization approaches across a range of patterns including rehost, replatform, refactor, rearchitect, rebuild, and replace.
• Lead architecture for modern application platforms using containers, microservices, APIs, serverless, event-driven integration, and cloud-native services.
• Define reusable infrastructure/application modules, reference architectures, accelerators, and design standards.
• Ensure solutions are scalable, secure, resilient, cost-optimized, and aligned to customer business objectives.

• Provide architectural leadership throughout program delivery from inception to go-live.
• Guide delivery teams through architecture decisions, design reviews, risk mitigation, and technical governance.
• Oversee implementation quality across cloud foundations, CI/CD, platform engineering, migration, and modernization workstreams.
• Collaborate with delivery managers, engineers, product teams, and customer stakeholders to ensure successful execution.
• Resolve complex architecture and design issues, balancing speed, quality, cost, and business impact.
• Establish governance models, standards, review forums, and best practices to support consistent delivery outcomes.

• Define and drive modern DevOps/DevSecOps practices across build, test, release, deployment, monitoring, and operational support.
• Lead adoption of Infrastructure as Code, policy as code, automated testing, and deployment automation.
• Guide engineering teams on CI/CD frameworks, environment strategies, release governance, and platform reliability.
• Promote reusable engineering assets and modular cloud patterns to improve speed, consistency, and quality.

• Lead cloud migration and modernization strategies for enterprise application portfolios.
• Assess application estates and define migration waves, modernization approaches, and target operating models.
• Design solutions for legacy modernization, platform modernization, data integration, API enablement, and cloud-native transformation.
• Drive adoption of modern engineering practices to improve agility, resilience, scalability, and time-to-market.
• Ensure business continuity, security, compliance, and operational readiness throughout migration and transformation initiatives.

• Contribute to the growth of the cloud/application innovation practice through thought leadership, offerings, reusable assets, and internal capability development.
• Mentor architects, engineers, and consulting teams on architecture standards, modernization patterns, and cloud best practices.
• Stay current with market trends, hyperscaler capabilities, modernization frameworks, and emerging technologies.
• Support capability-building initiatives, internal training, and go-to-market solution development.

• 15+ years of experience in enterprise architecture, application architecture, cloud transformation, or technology consulting roles.
• Strong experience in customer-facing pre-sales, consulting, and solutioning for large and complex transformation engagements.
• Proven track record leading architecture for cloud migrations and application modernization programs.
• Experience overseeing delivery of enterprise-scale cloud transformation initiatives across multiple workstreams and stakeholders.
• Strong understanding of cloud operating models, governance, architecture assurance, and large-scale transformation delivery.
• Demonstrated ability to engage and influence both executive stakeholders and deeply technical teams.

• Deep expertise in at least one major cloud platform: Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud
• Strong experience designing landing zones including:
  
  
  • Identity and access management
  • Network topology and connectivity
  • Security controls and guardrails
  • Management groups / account structures / subscriptions
  • Logging, monitoring, and observability
  • Policy, governance, and compliance
  • Cost management and operational readiness

• Deep knowledge of application modernization strategies and patterns, especially for enterprise legacy estates
• Experience with:
  
  
  • Microservices architecture
  • Containerization and orchestration (e.g., Kubernetes, OpenShift, ECS, AKS, EKS, GKE)
  • API-led integration
  • Event-driven architecture
  • Serverless patterns
  • Twelve-factor and cloud-native design principles
  • Application decomposition and domain-driven modernization

• Strong hands-on understanding of DevOps / DevSecOps practices
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and automation tooling
• Expertise in Infrastructure as Code and reusable module development using tools such as Terraform, Bicep, CloudFormation, Pulumi, or similar
• Knowledge of testing automation, release orchestration, policy enforcement, and platform engineering principles
• Familiarity with observability, SRE principles, operational resilience, and cloud operations

• Experience in application portfolio assessment, migration planning, modernization roadmaps, and execution governance
• Strong understanding of migration frameworks, dependency mapping, environment strategy, cutover planning, and risk controls
• Experience modernizing enterprise applications across web, middleware, integration, and supporting platform services

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or related discipline
• Master's degree preferred
• Relevant cloud certifications such as:
  
  
  • AWS Certified Solutions Architect / Professional
  • Microsoft Azure Solutions Architect Expert
  • Google Professional Cloud Architect
  • Kubernetes / DevOps / Security certifications
• Experience in consulting, systems integrators, managed services, or large enterprise transformation environments
• Familiarity with FinOps, security architecture, enterprise integration, data modernization, and platform operating models