.NET Application Modernization Consultant — Senior / Pod Lead

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 Expe