Principal Financial Group ↗

Solutions architect leading the modernization of Principal's retirement-billing platform from a COBOL/mainframe monolith to a cloud-native AWS architecture. 20% allocated to the business unit AI Enablement team.

Highlights

• Lead the architectural design for modernizing the retirement-billing platform, which serves tens of thousands of plan contracts. The target architecture migrates the platform from a COBOL/mainframe monolith to cloud-native AWS, with strategic vendor integration filling capability gaps.
• Facilitate Event Storming sessions with engineering, product, and operations stakeholders to map the legacy billing domain into bounded contexts and clarify system ownership.
• Built a Claude Skill trained on Principal's COBOL codebase that, per the company's lead COBOL experts, outperformed vendor tools costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. Composed it with custom DB2 and source-code analysis Skills to cut a three-month Senior Engineer impact-analysis effort on the retirement-billing modernization to under an hour.
• Authored the Vendor Decision Record (VDR) process being adopted company-wide to standardize vendor selections across Principal.
• Authored and presented CRAFT (Conceptualize, Refine, Architect, Fabricate, Test), a structured agentic development pattern, during a company-wide demo.
• Champion AI integration within the Solutions Architecture team. Other architects route AI questions here first, whether the work is an architectural review, a vendor evaluation, or working out how to apply AI to a specific problem.
• Authored a standardized non-functional requirements questionnaire distributed to vendor candidates during evaluation, giving product teams a consistent rubric for comparing vendors.
• Rewrote Principal's internal DB2 skill and built a source-code analysis skill that understands the codebase's conventions, enabling dependency-graph generation and deep impact analysis across COBOL, DB2, and modern services.
• Partner with enterprise architecture, technical leadership, and product leadership to define target-state architecture and migration sequencing for participant-facing workflows.

Tech Stack