About the Solutions Architect role
A Solutions Architect designs the technical blueprint that connects business goals to working systems. They evaluate requirements, choose technologies, define how services and integrations fit together, and guide engineering teams through implementation. Because their decisions shape scalability, security, and cost for years after they are made, the role carries real weight and demands both breadth of knowledge and sound judgment under uncertainty.
The role sits between engineering, product, and often customers. A strong architect writes clear design documents, weighs trade-offs openly rather than hiding them, and communicates as comfortably with executives as with developers. In many companies, solutions architects also lead cloud migrations, review vendor proposals, set integration standards, and support pre-sales conversations by mapping a product's capabilities to a prospect's existing environment and constraints.
In your posting, clarify whether the role is internal, customer-facing, or both, and name your core stack and cloud provider. State how much hands-on coding you expect versus design and advisory work, since architects vary widely in how technical they want to stay. Mention the scale of the systems they will own and the teams they will influence, because senior candidates weigh scope as heavily as compensation.
Solutions Architect job description template
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Job brief
We are hiring a Solutions Architect to design how our systems fit together and to see those designs through. You will translate requirements into an architecture, choose the technologies, define the integrations, document the trade-offs openly, and guide the engineering teams building against it.
This suits somebody who can hold a design conversation with an engineer in the morning and an executive in the afternoon without changing the substance, and who writes decisions down clearly enough that they survive the people who made them.
Responsibilities
- Translate business requirements into technical architectures and detailed design documents
- Evaluate technologies, platforms, and vendors and recommend options with clear trade-off analysis
- Design integrations, APIs, and data flows between internal systems and third-party services
- Define standards for security, reliability, scalability, and cost across solutions
- Guide engineering teams during implementation and review designs against the agreed architecture
- Lead cloud architecture decisions, including migration planning and cost optimization
- Present architectural proposals to leadership and, where relevant, to customers
- Identify technical risks early and define mitigation plans
- Keep architecture documentation current as systems evolve
Requirements and skills
- Has worked as an architect, or as a senior engineer moving into the role
- A real development background in at least one major language
- Has designed systems on a major cloud platform rather than only diagrammed them
- Sound on API design, services, event-driven patterns, and integration
- Builds security, identity, and compliance into a design from the start
- Produces architecture documents and diagrams other people can act on
- Communicates as clearly with executives as with developers
- A computer science degree, or the practical experience that replaced one
Nice to have
- Cloud architecture certifications such as AWS Solutions Architect or Azure Solutions Architect Expert
- Experience in pre-sales or customer-facing solution design
- Familiarity with infrastructure as code tools such as Terraform
- Experience leading large migrations or system modernization programs
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