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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Enterprise Solution Architect

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ArchitectureITCloudStrategy

🎯 Role Definition

The Enterprise Solution Architect is a senior technical and strategic role responsible for designing, governing, and delivering scalable, secure, and cost-effective enterprise solutions across business domains. This role bridges business strategy and technology execution—defining solution blueprints, selecting platforms, driving cloud & integration strategies, and ensuring alignment with enterprise architecture principles and non-functional requirements (security, performance, availability, compliance). The Enterprise Solution Architect helps lead technology decision-making, provides technical leadership for multi-disciplinary teams, and ensures that solution designs support both short-term delivery and long-term platform evolution.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Senior Solution Architect or Lead Solutions Engineer with cross-functional delivery experience.
  • Systems Architect, Software Engineering Manager, or Technical Lead who has led large-scale integrations.
  • Cloud Architect or Principal Developer with proven architecture and stakeholder engagement experience.

Advancement To:

  • Enterprise Architect or Chief Architect responsible for cross-program architecture governance.
  • Head of Architecture, Director of Technology, or VP Engineering accountable for strategic technology direction.
  • Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for organizations blending product, platform, and architecture leadership.

Lateral Moves:

  • Cloud Architect (AWS/Azure/GCP) focusing on cloud transformation and migration programs.
  • Data Architect or Head of Data Engineering specializing in enterprise data strategy and analytics.
  • Security Architect or Risk & Compliance Lead concentrating on secure-by-design initiatives.

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Develop end-to-end solution architectures and technical roadmaps that translate business strategy and requirements into pragmatic architectures, including high-level, mid-level and low-level design artifacts, reference architectures, and migration plans.
  • Lead the creation of solution blueprints for multi-tier, distributed systems—defining component interactions, integration patterns, API contracts, data flow, storage models, and non-functional requirements (scalability, resiliency, performance).
  • Evaluate and select technology platforms, cloud services (IaaS/PaaS/SaaS), middleware, and third-party vendors by conducting comparative analysis, total cost of ownership (TCO) assessments, and proof-of-concept (POC) evaluations.
  • Drive cloud architecture and migration strategy (lift-and-shift, replatforming, refactoring) across AWS, Azure, and/or GCP and define target state architectures, governance guardrails, cost optimisation and security baselines.
  • Define and enforce architecture standards, design patterns, and best practices (microservices, event-driven architectures, API-first design, domain-driven design) to ensure consistency, interoperability, and maintainability across the enterprise.
  • Architect secure solutions by integrating identity and access management (IAM), encryption, network segmentation, security-by-design principles, and compliance controls (GDPR, HIPAA, PCI-DSS) into solution designs and deployment pipelines.
  • Collaborate with product owners, business stakeholders, data teams, and engineering leads to translate functional requirements into technical specifications and prioritized implementation roadmaps.
  • Lead cross-functional architecture review boards, design reviews, and technical governance processes to approve solutions, mitigate architectural risk, and ensure alignment to the enterprise architecture roadmap.
  • Create detailed application and integration patterns for synchronous and asynchronous communication (REST, gRPC, messaging/event streaming like Kafka), specifying retry, backpressure, and circuit-breaker strategies.
  • Design resilient, observable systems by specifying monitoring, logging, tracing (OpenTelemetry), and alerting strategies that support operational excellence and SRE/DevOps practices.
  • Define CI/CD, automation, and infrastructure-as-code (IaC) strategies using tools such as Terraform, CloudFormation, Ansible, and pipelines to enable repeatable, auditable deployments.
  • Drive data architecture considerations within solutions, including canonical data models, data lineage, master data management (MDM), data governance, and integration with data lakes/data warehouses for analytics.
  • Produce high-quality architecture artifacts (architecture diagrams, interface definitions, component specifications, decision records, and trade-off analyses) and present them to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
  • Mentor and coach solution architects, engineers, and other technical leads to uplift architecture capability and ensure consistent application of principles across teams.
  • Manage technical debt and propose re-architecture plans or incremental modernization approaches that minimize disruption while reducing long-term costs and risk.
  • Estimate effort, resource needs, and risk for solution delivery; provide cost/benefit and ROI assessments to support prioritization and investment decisions.
  • Participate in vendor selection, contract negotiations, and supplier governance; evaluate SaaS/PaaS offerings for fit, security, SLAs and integration capability.
  • Lead or contribute to enterprise-level transformation programs—coordinating dependencies, defining integration strategies, and monitoring compliance with architectural guardrails throughout program lifecycle.
  • Ensure solutions meet performance, capacity, backup/recovery, and disaster recovery requirements by specifying SLOs/SLAs and defining operational runbooks.
  • Facilitate proof-of-concept deliveries and prototype development to validate new technologies, reduce uncertainty, and accelerate adoption of modern architectures.
  • Champion cost optimization and cloud financial management (FinOps) practices by recommending sizing, reserved instances, autoscaling, and lifecycle policies.
  • Stay current on emerging technologies, industry trends, and vendor roadmaps; drive continuous improvement and innovation by recommending pilots for AI/ML, serverless, edge computing, and container orchestration.
  • Provide technical leadership during incident response and post-incident reviews (postmortems) to identify root causes and architecture changes to prevent recurrence.
  • Translate enterprise strategy into measurable architecture KPIs and contribute to periodic architecture health reviews and executive reporting.

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.
  • Develop training materials, run architecture walkthroughs and brown-bags to disseminate architectural decisions across teams.
  • Assist procurement and legal with technical evaluations and security questionnaires for new vendors and services.
  • Support recruitment by helping define role profiles, interviewing candidates for senior technical hires, and setting technical bar for architecture roles.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Enterprise architecture frameworks (TOGAF, Zachman) and experience applying architecture governance at scale.
  • Solution architecture and systems design for large-scale, distributed systems including microservices, event-driven and domain-driven designs.
  • Cloud architecture expertise across AWS, Microsoft Azure, and/or Google Cloud Platform (GCP) — including compute, networking, storage, identity, and managed services.
  • API strategy and design (RESTful APIs, GraphQL, gRPC), API gateways and management platforms (Apigee, Kong, AWS API Gateway).
  • Integration patterns and middleware (message brokers, ESB, Kafka, RabbitMQ) and experience designing asynchronous, resilient integrations.
  • Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform, CloudFormation, ARM templates) and configuration management tooling.
  • Containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes, EKS/AKS/GKE) and experience designing cloud-native deployments.
  • Security architecture and controls (IAM, OAuth/OpenID Connect, encryption, secrets management), knowledge of security frameworks and compliance obligations.
  • Data architecture and modeling (relational and NoSQL databases, data lakes, data warehousing), ETL/ELT patterns and data governance principles.
  • DevOps, CI/CD pipelines and automation using tools like Jenkins, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps, or GitHub Actions.
  • Observability, monitoring and telemetry (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK, OpenTelemetry) and SRE practices for availability and incident management.
  • Performance engineering, capacity planning and cost optimization skills including cloud cost management (FinOps).
  • Technical evaluation and vendor selection experience including hands-on POCs and TCO analysis.
  • IaC, scripting and automation (Python, Bash, PowerShell) for orchestration and tooling integration.

Soft Skills

  • Strong stakeholder management and executive communication—able to translate complex technical concepts into business outcomes and articulate trade-offs.
  • Leadership and mentoring—experience guiding engineering teams, conducting design reviews and improving architectural capability.
  • Strategic thinking and business acumen—align technology decisions with business value, regulatory constraints, and competitive advantage.
  • Problem solving and critical thinking—able to evaluate alternatives, perform risk analysis and make defensible architecture decisions.
  • Collaboration and facilitation—skilled in running workshops, architecture review boards, and cross-functional alignment sessions.
  • Adaptability and continuous learning—curiosity for emerging technologies and willingness to pilot new approaches.
  • Negotiation and influencing—manage vendor relationships and internal prioritization through strong persuasion and negotiation skills.
  • Time management and execution orientation—balancing roadmap planning with delivery milestones and short-term engineering needs.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

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

Preferred Education:

  • Master’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Business Administration (MBA) with technology focus, or related advanced qualification.
  • Professional certifications (TOGAF, AWS/Azure/GCP architecture certifications, CISSP, PMP, or equivalent) are strongly preferred.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Software Engineering
  • Information Systems
  • Cloud Computing / Distributed Systems
  • Business Administration (for technology leadership roles)

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 8–15 years of relevant IT experience, with 5+ years in architecture or principal engineering roles and demonstrable experience delivering enterprise-scale solutions.

Preferred:

  • 10+ years of experience working across application, integration and cloud landscapes in medium-to-large enterprises.
  • Proven track record of leading architecture for multi-cloud migrations, large integration programs, or strategic platform builds.
  • Experience operating within regulated industries (finance, healthcare, public sector) or with strict security/compliance constraints is a plus.
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