.NET Application Modernization Consultant — Senior / Pod Lead - Remote Contract Opportunity [ FastWater Staffing ]

📍 Location: Fully Remote (Maryland, U.S.)
📄 Employment Type: Contract
🚀 Start Date: Immediate
💲 Compensation: TBD — based on skills and experience

Important Screening Requirements

• Due to client and clearance requirements, candidates must be U.S. Citizens or U.S. Permanent Residents (Green Card holders) and able to work in the United States without current or future visa sponsorship.

• Undergo fingerprinting as part of the onboarding process.
• Successfully complete a government background investigation (CJIS-type clearance).

About the Role

We are seeking a .NET Application Modernization Consultant – Senior / Pod Lead to serve as the technical authority for a large-scale .NET modernization initiative. This role combines hands-on engineering leadership with architectural decision-making and technical mentorship.

The successful candidate will own the modernization strategy, establish technical standards, resolve the most complex migration challenges, and guide a team of modernization consultants through the conversion of a large enterprise application portfolio. This individual will be responsible for solving the problems that automated migration tooling cannot address.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the .NET Framework to .NET 8+ modernization strategy across the workstream
• Establish technical standards, migration patterns, and quality expectations
• Make and document key architectural decisions regarding:
  • Distributed transaction modernization (DTC replacement strategies)
  • ASP.NET Web Forms migration approaches
  • WPF application disposition (retire, retain on Windows, or rewrite)
• Perform hands-on modernization of the most complex application components
• Lead remediation of incompatible NuGet dependencies and package modernization efforts
• Reverse-engineer and replace private packages where source code is unavailable
• Review and approve modernization work completed by staff consultants
• Ensure functional parity, maintainability, and performance of migrated applications
• Evaluate where modernization tooling can accelerate delivery versus where manual intervention is required
• Partner with delivery leadership to identify risks, dependencies, and mitigation strategies

Required Qualifications

Core .NET Modernization Expertise

• Expert-level C# development experience using modern language features
• Extensive hands-on experience migrating applications from:
  • .NET Framework
  • .NET Core
  • .NET 6 / 7 / 8
• Deep understanding of runtime and Base Class Library (BCL) differences between framework versions

Project & Solution Modernization

• Experience converting:
  • Legacy project formats to SDK-style projects
  • packages.config to PackageReference
  • Legacy solutions to multi-targeted architectures
• Strong understanding of:
  • Target Framework Monikers (TFMs)
  • .NET Standard
  • Shared library modernization

Configuration Modernization

• Experience migrating:
  • web.config
  • app.config
  • ConfigurationManager

To:

• IConfiguration
• appsettings.json
• Options Pattern

ASP.NET Modernization

• Extensive experience migrating:
  • ASP.NET MVC
  • ASP.NET Web API

To:

• ASP.NET Core
• Kestrel
• ASP.NET Core Middleware Pipeline
• Experience replacing legacy dependency injection frameworks such as:
  • Unity
  • Autofac
  • Ninject
  • StructureMap

With:

• Microsoft.Extensions.DependencyInjection
• Strong understanding of:
  • Global.asax to Program.cs migration
  • Startup modernization
  • HttpContext API changes

Legacy API & Framework Remediation

Experience modernizing or replacing:

• BinaryFormatter
• .NET Remoting
• AppDomain-based implementations
• System.Drawing.Common workloads on Linux
• System.Runtime.Caching
• Legacy WCF clients

Including modern alternatives such as:

• ImageSharp
• SkiaSharp
• IMemoryCache
• IDistributedCache
• CoreWCF
• gRPC
• REST-based service architectures

Specialized Modernization Challenges

Distributed Transactions & DTC Modernization

• Experience redesigning TransactionScope and MSDTC-based systems
• Strong understanding of:
  • Saga patterns
  • Outbox patterns
  • Idempotency
  • Eventual consistency

ASP.NET Web Forms Modernization

• Experience migrating or rewriting Web Forms applications using:
  • Razor Pages
  • ASP.NET MVC
  • Blazor

WPF Modernization

• Experience assessing modernization strategies for WPF applications
• Ability to evaluate options including:
  • Retention on Windows
  • Migration to web technologies
  • Avalonia
  • .NET MAUI

NuGet & Dependency Modernization

• Experience replacing unsupported or incompatible NuGet packages
• Ability to analyze and reverse-engineer private package dependencies when source code is unavailable

T4 Template Modernization

• Experience converting T4-based solutions to:
  • Roslyn Source Generators
  • Mono.TextTemplating
  • Alternative modern code-generation approaches

Tooling & Delivery Experience

Hands-on experience with:

• .NET Upgrade Assistant
• AWS Porting Assistant for .NET
• try-convert
• .NET API Portability Analyzer (apiport)
• Git
• Azure DevOps
• GitHub Actions
• Automated build, test, and deployment pipelines

Additional experience with:

• Linux-targeted .NET workloads
• Containerization concepts and deployment considerations

Preferred Qualifications

• AWS Certifications
• Experience modernizing large monolithic enterprise applications
• Experience decomposing monolithic architectures into modern services
• Prior AWS Transformation Framework (ATF) or comparable modernization program experience
• Experience leading large-scale enterprise application modernization initiatives

Ideal Candidate

The ideal candidate is a hands-on modernization leader who has successfully delivered complex .NET Framework-to-.NET modernization programs at scale. They are equally comfortable making high-impact architectural decisions, solving difficult migration challenges, and mentoring engineering teams through the modernization journey while maintaining delivery quality and functional parity.