Technical Architect – Wealth and Retirement

Company Overview

At Bridgenext, we engineer Growth Operating Systems. Most enterprises have spent millions on their revenue stack and still aren't seeing the growth they expected.They have tools that function, but no system that wins. We help growth-hungry companies close that gap by turning fragmented platforms, siloed teams, and disconnected data into one integrated Growth OS. More than a technology company or marketing agency, we're a global digital consultancy with experts in engineering, data, AI, creative and more.

Our teams are made up of experts who believe in engineering impact, starting with putting people at the center of everything we do. Every team member directly shapes our work, culture, and values. Nothing matters more to us than a kind, respectful, fulfilling environment that supports everyone. Our flexible, inclusive culture gives you the autonomy, resources, and opportunities to thrive.

Position Description

Bridgenext is seeking a Principal Engineer / Technical Architect with deep hands-on engineering experience and demonstrated domain knowledge in US Retirement, wealth management, asset management, or adjacent financial services platforms.

This role will play a key part in the modernization of a business-critical retirement recordkeeping landscape built on legacy Visual FoxPro applications and data components, as plans transition onto a modern SaaS recordkeeping platform and the legacy environment is progressively retired. The architect will work closely with long-tenured business and technology SMEs to capture system knowledge, understand undocumented or partially documented business logic, reverse-engineer existing applications where necessary, and ensure each capability is either carried correctly onto the target platform or deliberately retired.

The ideal candidate brings a combination of legacy application understanding, retirement recordkeeping conversion experience, and modern cloud engineering depth. They should be comfortable moving from Visual FoxPro code, data structures, batch processes, integrations, and embedded business rules to the design of data conversion, integration, and service layers on Azure and Java-based platforms.

This is not primarily a legacy application support role, and it is not a line-by-line code rewrite. The objective is to understand and safely transition critical business capabilities from the existing environment into a modern technology platform, while protecting business continuity and preserving complex Wealth and Retirement domain logic. The architect will determine which legacy behaviors the target recordkeeping platform absorbs natively, which must be built as surrounding services, and which can be retired.

Deep US Retirement / retirement plan recordkeeping experience is strongly preferred; strong wealth or asset management experience with transferable domain depth will also be considered.

Key Responsibilities:

• Lead the technical discovery and modernization of legacy Visual FoxPro applications, including application components, business rules, data structures, interfaces, batch processes, reports, and operational dependencies, and define the technical path to retire them as business moves to the target platform.
• Work directly with existing business and technology SMEs to drive structured knowledge transfer and knowledge capture, converting institutional knowledge into sustainable technical documentation, architecture artifacts, domain models, and implementation specifications.
• Analyze and reverse-engineer existing Visual FoxPro applications and undocumented or partially documented code to identify critical business rules, processing flows, data dependencies, integrations, exception handling, and operational behaviors.
• Develop current-state architecture and dependency views covering legacy applications, databases/files, interfaces, downstream consumers, scheduled processing, security, and operational workflows.
• Produce and maintain a disposition decision for every legacy component (absorbed by the target platform, rebuilt as a surrounding service, re-pointed, or retired), captured as defensible architecture decision records.
• Define the migration strategy for moving plans from the legacy environment to the target recordkeeping platform, including wave planning by plan complexity, controlled coexistence of legacy and target platforms, cut-over and rollback approaches, and progressive legacy decommissioning.
• Own the technical design of legacy data extraction, cleansing, conversion, and reconciliation across plan, participant, payroll, investment, transaction, and document data, moving through an interim staging repository into the target platform with auditable reconciliation at each stage.
• Translate legacy capabilities into the target architecture, distinguishing what the SaaS recordkeeping platform provides natively from what must be built around it, such as Java/Spring Boot microservices, APIs exposed through Azure API Management, Azure SQL Managed Instance data stores, and integration pipelines.
• Inventory and re-point legacy dependencies, including batch jobs, file-based data feeds extracted from legacy tables, reporting feeds into the enterprise data platform, managed file transfers, and manual operational procedures that rely on direct access to legacy data.
• Identify business logic that should be preserved, rationalized, redesigned, or retired, partnering with domain SMEs and product stakeholders to validate functional equivalence during modernization.
• Lead detailed solution design across application services, APIs, integrations, data persistence, security, and deployment, producing implementable HLD/LLD artifacts and engineering patterns.
• Work hands-on with engineering teams by reviewing and contributing code, building POCs and technical spikes, validating modernization approaches, troubleshooting complex legacy behaviors, and establishing practical implementation standards.
• Establish approaches for functional equivalence and regression validation so that critical Retirement and Wealth business rules continue to operate correctly as plans are converted, including parallel-run comparison of balances, vesting, contributions, and distributions between legacy and target platforms.
• Define reusable integration patterns using REST/OpenAPI, Azure API Management, managed file transfer, ETL tooling such as Azure Data Factory or CloverDX, and asynchronous messaging where appropriate.
• Partner with data platform teams to transition downstream data feeds to a lakehouse architecture (ADLS, Databricks) so that reporting and analytics consumers are not disrupted as source systems change.
• Establish engineering practices for CI/CD, infrastructure as code, automated testing, observability, logging, metrics, tracing, and production diagnostics so the modernized applications are maintainable and supportable.
• Partner with product owners, business SMEs, enterprise architects, and engineering leads to translate complex Retirement and Wealth workflows into technical designs and modernization priorities.
• Mentor engineering teams and help progressively transfer ownership from legacy SMEs into a broader engineering organization, reducing key-person and legacy-technology dependency.

Workplace: This role is hybrid and open to candidates in the Greater Boston area who are willing to travel to the office 2-3 times per week.

Must Have Skills:

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including at least 3 years operating as a Principal Engineer, Technical Architect, Solution Architect, or equivalent on enterprise platforms, with recent hands-on technical responsibility.
• Hands-on experience with Visual FoxPro / FoxPro applications, with the ability to read, understand, troubleshoot, and reverse-engineer an existing application codebase and extract its underlying business logic for conversion.
• Experience analyzing legacy application architectures, including data structures, batch processing, interfaces, embedded business rules, dependencies, and operational workflows, particularly where system documentation may be incomplete.
• Demonstrated experience leading or contributing to legacy application modernization, moving business capabilities from older monolithic/client-server platforms into modern packaged, SaaS, service-based, or cloud-native architectures.
• Experience delivering large-scale data conversion or platform migration programs, including source-to-target mapping, data cleansing, reconciliation, wave-based cut-over, parallel running, and progressive legacy decommissioning.
• Strong hands-on experience with Microsoft Azure and modern distributed-system patterns, including Azure API Management, Azure SQL / SQL Managed Instance, Azure Data Factory, scalable data platforms, and Azure-native security and monitoring.
• Strong programming depth in a modern enterprise backend stack, preferably Java/Spring Boot (.NET/C# or Python also considered), with the ability to review and contribute production-quality code.
• Proven experience designing production APIs and integration solutions using REST, OpenAPI/Swagger, API gateways, asynchronous messaging, file-based integration, retries, idempotency, and error-handling patterns.
• Strong understanding of relational databases and modern data architectures, including schema design, transactional processing, query/performance considerations, data migration, reconciliation, and consistency.
• Relevant financial-services domain experience in US Retirement, wealth management, asset management, investment platforms, brokerage/custody, or closely related recordkeeping and transaction-processing environments.
• Ability to work directly with long-tenured SMEs, conduct effective technical KT sessions, ask the right questions, identify undocumented behavior, and turn acquired knowledge into clear technical specifications and sustainable engineering artifacts.
• Strong consulting and engineering-leadership posture: able to communicate with business and technology stakeholders, produce clear architecture documentation, defend technical decisions, mentor teams, and operate effectively in complex modernization programs.

Preferred Skills:

• Deep US Retirement / retirement plan recordkeeping experience, including defined contribution plans such as 401(k), 403(b), and 457(b), IRA/rollover flows, and lifecycle processes such as eligibility/enrollment, contributions/payroll, vesting, trades/pricing, distributions, loans, QDROs, and RMDs.
• Experience converting plans onto, or integrating with, FIS OMNI or a comparable recordkeeping platform, including SaaS deployments, plan-setup configuration, and conversion tooling.
• Experience modernizing Visual FoxPro-based enterprise applications, including familiarity with FoxPro/Visual FoxPro application architecture, DBF-based data models, legacy integrations, reporting, batch processing, and migration considerations.
• Experience taking ownership of legacy applications during SME transition, technology sunset, or application transformation programs, including structured knowledge capture and reverse engineering.
• Experience migrating legacy application capabilities to the Microsoft Azure ecosystem, including Azure SQL Managed Instance, API Management, Data Factory, ADLS, Databricks, and Azure DevOps or equivalent services.
• Familiarity with retirement regulations and operating constraints such as ERISA, IRS/DOL rules, non-discrimination testing, SECURE 2.0, participant-data privacy, and high-volume processing around payroll, trading, or market events.
• Experience with legacy core platforms such as OBI, SunGard, mainframe COBOL/CICS, or similar legacy financial-services environments, and modernization patterns that allow legacy and new services to coexist safely.
• Experience with wealth or asset-management workflows such as account/portfolio servicing, holdings and transactions, trading, custody, fund administration, or investment platforms.
• Familiarity with retirement and investment ecosystem integrations or standards such as payroll/provider files, SPARK conventions, NSCC/DTCC or Fund/SERV, custodians, plan sponsors, TPAs, and downstream reporting platforms.
• Familiarity with the surrounding retirement servicing ecosystem, such as CRM (e.g., Salesforce), document generation and e-signature, payroll integration providers, and BPM/workflow platforms.
• Experience using AI-assisted engineering tools for legacy code analysis, code understanding, documentation generation, dependency analysis, test generation, and modernization, while independently validating generated outputs.
• Experience establishing automated characterization/regression tests around legacy applications before modernization, enabling business rules and existing system behavior to be validated as functionality is progressively replaced.

Bridgenext is an Equal Opportunity Employer

US citizens and those authorized to work in the US are encouraged to apply

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