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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Application Solutions Architect

💰 $ - $

EngineeringArchitectureSoftware Development

🎯 Role Definition

We are seeking an experienced Application Solutions Architect to lead architecture design and delivery of enterprise-grade applications. The ideal candidate partners with product owners, engineering teams, security, and operations to define solution blueprints, enforce architectural governance, and ensure solutions meet business goals for scalability, reliability, performance, and cost efficiency. This role requires deep technical expertise across cloud platforms, microservices, APIs, integration patterns, and modern delivery practices (CI/CD, IaC) combined with strong stakeholder management and communication skills.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Senior Software Engineer / Senior Developer with broad system design experience
  • Technical Lead or Engineering Manager responsible for architecture decisions
  • Integration Architect or Cloud Engineer transitioning to solution-level responsibilities

Advancement To:

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

Lateral Moves:

  • Cloud Architect (AWS/Azure/GCP specialist)
  • Platform/Product Architect
  • DevOps or Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Lead

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Lead end-to-end solution architecture for complex application initiatives, producing architecture artifacts (component diagrams, sequence diagrams, data flows, and deployment models) that guide engineering teams through implementation with clarity and technical rationale.
  • Design cloud-native architectures (AWS, Azure, GCP) that balance scalability, high availability, disaster recovery, and cost optimization, and provide migration strategies for legacy monolithic applications to modern microservices or serverless patterns.
  • Define API strategy and governance—design RESTful and/or GraphQL APIs, API versioning approaches, contract-first practices, API security (OAuth2, JWT, mTLS) and documentation standards (OpenAPI/Swagger).
  • Architect integration solutions using enterprise integration patterns and middleware (message brokers, ESBs, Kafka, RabbitMQ), ensuring reliable asynchronous communication, event-driven design, and idempotent processing across systems.
  • Evaluate, recommend, and standardize on technology stacks, frameworks, and third-party services that meet non-functional requirements (performance, scalability, security, maintainability).
  • Produce detailed effort, risk, and technical debt assessments to support roadmap prioritization and executive decision-making; articulate trade-offs and mitigation plans clearly to stakeholders.
  • Collaborate with Product Management to translate business requirements into robust technical solutions, ensuring alignment with product roadmaps and KPIs.
  • Establish and enforce architecture governance, coding standards, best practices, and reusable patterns to improve team velocity and maintain quality across multiple delivery teams.
  • Drive security architecture and compliance controls—perform threat modeling, define secure-by-design patterns, and integrate security testing into CI/CD pipelines to satisfy regulatory requirements and internal policies.
  • Define data architecture considerations for applications—data modeling, transactional vs. analytical dataflows, caching strategies, data partitioning, encryption at rest/in transit, and GDPR/CCPA compliance where applicable.
  • Design deployment and delivery pipelines (CI/CD) leveraging automation tools (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps), container registries, and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, ARM, CloudFormation) to enable reliable, repeatable releases.
  • Architect containerized solutions and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes) including multi-cluster strategies, service mesh (Istio/Linkerd) considerations, and runtime observability for production workloads.
  • Establish performance and scalability baselines—conduct capacity planning, load and stress test strategy, and tuning recommendations to meet SLAs and SLOs.
  • Define monitoring, logging, and observability strategy (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK, Datadog, New Relic) that enables fast incident detection, triage, and root cause analysis.
  • Lead cross-functional architecture reviews and design walkthroughs; mentor engineering teams to raise overall architectural literacy and to facilitate consistent implementation across squads.
  • Create cost models and continuous cost-optimization plans for cloud spend, including right-sizing, reserved instances, autoscaling, and tiered storage strategies.
  • Prototype new technologies and proof-of-concepts to validate architectural approaches and quickly identify integration challenges or performance bottlenecks.
  • Ensure interoperability and backward compatibility when introducing new services or versions, and create migration/rollout strategies to minimize disruption.
  • Drive disaster recovery and business continuity planning for critical application components, including RTO/RPO targets, multi-region deployment strategies, and failover testing.
  • Participate in vendor evaluation and third-party solution selection, including RFP/RFI processes, technical due diligence, and negotiation support.
  • Produce comprehensive architecture documentation and decision records (ADR) to maintain institutional knowledge, support audits, and onboard new teams efficiently.
  • Provide on-call architectural guidance during major incidents and post-incident reviews; recommend preventive changes and track remediation items to closure.

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.
  • Coach and mentor mid-level architects and senior engineers to align with architectural standards and to grow internal capabilities.
  • Facilitate cross-team dependencies and release coordination across multiple product lines to ensure architecture consistency and integration reliability.
  • Maintain awareness of emerging technologies, vendor roadmaps, and industry trends to provide strategic recommendations and drive innovation.
  • Assist in recruitment and technical interviewing for architecture and senior engineering roles, articulating required competencies and evaluating candidate fit.
  • Support proof-of-concept (PoC) execution and present findings to stakeholders with clear recommendations and next steps.
  • Define and maintain non-functional requirement templates (security, scalability, maintainability) and ensure they are incorporated into backlog refinement and acceptance criteria.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Application Architecture & Design Patterns — deep experience designing layered, hexagonal, and event-driven architectures for scalable enterprise applications.
  • Cloud Platforms — hands-on expertise with AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform services, including compute, networking, storage, and managed databases.
  • Microservices & Serverless — proven ability to design microservices boundaries, data ownership, inter-service communication, and serverless function patterns.
  • API Design & Management — OpenAPI/Swagger, REST, GraphQL, API gateways (Apigee, AWS API Gateway), API security standards (OAuth2, JWT).
  • Integration & Messaging — enterprise integration patterns, ESB alternatives, Kafka, RabbitMQ, JMS, and event streaming design.
  • Containerization & Orchestration — Docker, Kubernetes, Helm, operators, cluster networking, and runtime resilience patterns.
  • Infrastructure as Code & Automation — Terraform, CloudFormation, ARM templates, CI/CD pipelines, GitOps practices and automation frameworks.
  • Programming Languages & Frameworks — practical experience in Java, .NET, Node.js, Python or Go and familiarity with frameworks used in building microservices.
  • Databases & Storage — relational (PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server) and NoSQL (Cassandra, MongoDB, DynamoDB), caching strategies (Redis, Memcached).
  • Security & Compliance — threat modeling, secure coding practices, identity federation (SAML, OAuth), encryption, and working with compliance frameworks (PCI, SOC2, ISO).
  • Observability & Monitoring — Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK, Datadog, distributed tracing (Jaeger, Zipkin) and logging strategy design.
  • Performance Engineering — load testing, capacity planning, profiling and tuning applications for throughput and latency requirements.
  • Networking & Connectivity — VPC design, hybrid connectivity, multi-region networking, load balancing, and service mesh concepts.
  • DevOps Practices — CI/CD, blue/green and canary deployments, rollback strategies, and SRE principles.
  • Enterprise Architecture Frameworks & Documentation — TOGAF, architecture decision records (ADRs), UML/C4 modeling for communicating design.

(At least 10 of these are required skills; additional technologies and tools can be listed as preferred.)

Soft Skills

  • Strategic Thinking — align technical decisions with business outcomes and translate vision into actionable roadmaps.
  • Strong Communication — explain complex technical concepts to both technical teams and non-technical stakeholders clearly and persuasively.
  • Leadership & Influence — lead cross-functional teams, influence architecture direction, and build consensus across distributed teams.
  • Stakeholder Management — prioritize competing requirements, manage expectations and negotiate trade-offs.
  • Problem Solving — pragmatic, data-driven approach to diagnosing root causes and selecting durable solutions.
  • Mentoring & Coaching — develop technical skills across engineering teams and elevate architectural practice.
  • Collaboration — work effectively with product, security, operations, and data teams in an agile environment.
  • Time Management & Prioritization — handle multiple initiatives and deliver architecture outputs under tight timelines.
  • Decision-Making Under Uncertainty — make timely architecture decisions with incomplete information and document rationale.
  • Continuous Learning — curiosity and commitment to staying current with tech trends, emerging patterns, and best practices.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or a related technical field (or equivalent practical experience).

Preferred Education:

  • Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or MBA for roles requiring strong business-technical alignment.
  • Professional certifications: AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Azure Solutions Architect, Google Professional Cloud Architect, TOGAF, or similar.

Relevant Fields of Study:

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

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 7 – 15+ years of progressive software development and architecture experience, with at least 3–5 years in a Solutions/Applications Architect role.

Preferred:

  • 8+ years designing enterprise application architectures and 3+ years of hands-on cloud architecture and migration experience.
  • Demonstrated track record leading multi-team initiatives, defining architectural standards, and delivering production systems at scale.
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