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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Application Architect

💰 $110,000 - $180,000

ArchitectureITSoftware Engineering

🎯 Role Definition

As an Application Architect you will lead the technical vision, design and governance for complex application landscapes across cloud and on-premise environments. You will translate business requirements into robust, scalable architectures, define integration and API strategies, guide development teams on patterns and best practices, and ensure non-functional requirements (security, performance, scalability, observability) are met. This role acts as both a hands-on technical expert and a strategic advisor to product, engineering, and operations teams.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Senior Software Engineer with architecture responsibilities and multi-tier system experience
  • Solutions Architect or Technical Lead with proven system design and integration experience
  • Systems Architect or Integration Architect working on enterprise applications

Advancement To:

  • Principal Architect / Enterprise Architect
  • Director of Engineering or Head of Platform
  • Chief Technology Officer (CTO) or VP of Architecture

Lateral Moves:

  • Technical Program Manager (TPM) for platform initiatives
  • DevOps / Cloud Architect focusing on cloud-native platform engineering

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Lead the end-to-end application architecture for new and existing products, producing high-fidelity architecture diagrams, decision records, and trade-off analyses that guide development and operations teams.
  • Define and own the application-level API strategy, including REST/GraphQL design, contract-first development, versioning, and backward compatibility policies to ensure consistent integration patterns across the organization.
  • Design cloud-native, microservices-based architectures that account for scalability, resiliency, fault tolerance, and cost-optimized deployment models on AWS/Azure/GCP.
  • Establish and enforce architecture standards, coding guidelines, and reusable reference implementations to drive consistency and accelerate developer productivity across multiple engineering teams.
  • Collaborate with product owners and business stakeholders to translate business requirements, KPIs, and SLAs into clear architecture requirements and measurable non-functional requirements (NFRs).
  • Architect secure authentication and authorization schemes (OAuth2, OpenID Connect, JWT), data encryption strategies, and threat mitigation patterns to meet compliance and enterprise security standards.
  • Drive data architecture decisions for transactional and analytical workloads, selecting appropriate relational and NoSQL stores, caching strategies (Redis, Memcached), and data partitioning patterns.
  • Design event-driven, asynchronous processing architectures using message brokers (Kafka, RabbitMQ) and stream processing where appropriate to improve system throughput and decoupling.
  • Create deployment and CI/CD architecture blueprints that enable automated build, test, and release pipelines, integrating with tools such as Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or Azure DevOps.
  • Define infrastructure-as-code (IaC) patterns and reusable modules (Terraform, CloudFormation, ARM templates) to standardize environment provisioning and reduce configuration drift.
  • Lead capacity planning, performance engineering, and load testing strategies to ensure systems meet performance targets and scale predictably under growth scenarios.
  • Provide technical mentorship and architecture reviews for engineering teams, conducting regular design reviews, code reviews, and architecture retrospectives to ensure implementation alignment.
  • Evaluate and recommend commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) products, middleware, and third-party services, conducting TCO analysis and proof-of-concept (POC) activities when necessary.
  • Drive observability and monitoring architecture, specifying logging, metrics, distributed tracing and alerting practices (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK, OpenTelemetry) to support SRE and incident response.
  • Collaborate with Infrastructure, Network, and Security teams to design secure network topologies, API gateways, service meshes (Istio/Linkerd), and secure service-to-service communication.
  • Produce and maintain architecture roadmaps that align with product roadmaps, technical debt reduction plans, and platform modernization initiatives.
  • Architect migration strategies for legacy monoliths to modular, service-oriented or cloud-native architectures with clear rollback, risk mitigation, and data migration plans.
  • Define and enforce scalability, availability (SLA), and disaster recovery (RTO/RPO) requirements, and design multi-region or multi-availability-zone deployment strategies.
  • Manage cross-team dependencies and technical risks, proactively identifying blockers and facilitating resolution through technical steering committees or architecture review boards.
  • Create cost-aware architecture decisions, optimizing cloud resource selection, autoscaling policies, and operational run-rate while balancing performance and reliability.
  • Drive developer experience improvements by defining SDKs, developer portals, CI templates, and sample applications that accelerate onboarding and consistent implementations.
  • Continuously research and evaluate emerging technologies (serverless, service mesh, container runtimes, edge computing) and produce adoption recommendations with impact analysis.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
  • Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
  • Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
  • Participate in architecture governance forums and help maintain the enterprise architecture decision log.
  • Provide emergency on-call support guidance and post-mortem action items related to architecture design when incidents occur.
  • Prepare stakeholder-facing documentation, executive summaries, and technical proposals that clearly articulate trade-offs and estimated effort.
  • Facilitate technical workshops, whiteboard sessions, and cross-functional syncs to align teams on complex integration and architecture topics.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Software Architecture & Design Patterns — Deep experience designing layered, modular, and service-oriented architectures using patterns such as domain-driven design (DDD), CQRS, and hexagonal architecture to improve maintainability and scalability.
  • Cloud Platforms — Practical expertise designing and deploying applications on public cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP) including managed services, networking, identity, and cost controls.
  • Microservices & API Design — Proven ability to design microservice boundaries, API contracts, versioning strategies, API gateways, and secure service-to-service communication.
  • Containerization & Orchestration — Hands-on knowledge of Docker and Kubernetes architecture, deployment patterns (Helm, Operators), and multi-tenant cluster strategies.
  • Integration & Messaging — Experience with event-driven architecture, message brokers (Kafka, RabbitMQ), event sourcing, and integration patterns for reliable asynchronous processing.
  • DevOps & CI/CD — Strong grasp of CI/CD best practices, pipeline design, infrastructure-as-code (Terraform/CloudFormation), and automation to enable repeatable deployments.
  • Security & Compliance — Knowledge of secure-by-design principles, identity and access management, encryption, key management, OWASP top 10 mitigation, and compliance frameworks (SOC2, ISO27001, GDPR).
  • Databases & Storage — Expertise in selecting and designing for SQL and NoSQL databases (Postgres, MySQL, MongoDB, Cassandra), caching strategies, and data partitioning for performance and availability.
  • Observability & Performance — Experience designing logging, metrics, tracing, profiling, and performance tuning strategies using tools like Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, Jaeger, or New Relic.
  • Networking & Infrastructure — Understanding of network topology, load balancing, CDN usage, DNS, service mesh concepts, and secure network design across hybrid environments.
  • Programming Languages & Frameworks — Proficiency in at least one major backend language and ecosystem (Java/Spring, .NET, Node.js, Python) plus familiarity with front-end architectures where applicable.
  • Testing & Quality — Adoption of automated testing at multiple levels (unit, integration, contract, smoke) and strategies to ensure architecture supports testability and QA automation.
  • Cost Optimization — Ability to analyze cloud cost drivers and architect solutions that balance performance and operational cost constraints.
  • Architecture Modeling & Documentation — Skilled at producing clear architecture diagrams, decision records, and technical design documents (C4, UML, ADRs).
  • Messaging & Streaming Systems — Familiarity with designing systems around high-throughput streaming and real-time processing (Kafka streams, Kinesis).

Soft Skills

  • Strategic Thinking — Ability to align technical decisions with business strategy and long-term product roadmaps.
  • Communication — Clear, persuasive written and verbal communication when explaining architecture trade-offs to both technical teams and non-technical stakeholders.
  • Leadership & Mentoring — Experience mentoring engineers, guiding technical leads, and growing architecture capabilities across teams.
  • Stakeholder Management — Skilled at negotiating priorities, managing expectations, and building consensus across product, engineering, and operations.
  • Problem Solving — Analytical thinker who breaks down complex problems, weighs trade-offs, and selects pragmatic engineering solutions.
  • Decision Making — Comfortable making architecture decisions with incomplete information and documenting rationale and mitigation plans.
  • Collaboration — Strong teamwork orientation with a track record of collaborating across cross-functional teams to deliver integrated solutions.
  • Adaptability — Willingness to learn new technologies, pivot strategies when needed, and operate in ambiguous environments.
  • Time & Priority Management — Able to balance long-term architecture initiatives with short-term delivery needs and sprint commitments.
  • Influencing Without Authority — Ability to drive adoption of standards and patterns through influence, example, and stakeholder buy-in.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or related technical discipline.

Preferred Education:

  • Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or an MBA/technology management degree for senior strategic roles.
  • Professional certifications such as TOGAF, AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Azure Solutions Architect, Google Professional Cloud Architect, or relevant security certifications (CISSP, CISM).

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Software Engineering
  • Information Systems
  • Cloud Computing / Distributed Systems

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 7–12+ years of professional software development experience with at least 3–5 years in architecture, design, or technical leadership roles.

Preferred:

  • 8+ years leading architecture for enterprise-scale applications, proven delivery of cloud-native or microservices projects, experience with cross-functional stakeholder management, and a track record of mentoring engineering teams and establishing architecture governance.
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