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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Enterprise Solutions Architect

💰 $120,000 - $200,000

ITArchitectureEnterpriseCloud

🎯 Role Definition

The Enterprise Solutions Architect is a senior technical leader who designs, governs, and drives strategic, scalable solution architectures across the enterprise. This role partners with business stakeholders, product owners, engineering teams, security, and operations to translate business strategy into technical roadmaps, select appropriate platforms (cloud, hybrid, or on-premises), and ensure solutions meet non-functional requirements such as security, performance, scalability, reliability, and cost efficiency. The Enterprise Solutions Architect advocates for architectural standards, ensures alignment to enterprise architecture frameworks (e.g., TOGAF), and leads complex cross-functional delivery initiatives and platform modernization efforts.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Senior Systems Architect or Senior Solutions Architect
  • Lead Cloud Architect / Cloud Engineer
  • Senior Software Engineer with architecture responsibilities

Advancement To:

  • Chief Architect / Enterprise Architect
  • VP of Engineering / Head of Architecture
  • CTO (Chief Technology Officer)

Lateral Moves:

  • Director of Platform Engineering
  • Product Management Director (technical product)
  • Technical Program Manager (large-scale transformation programs)

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Lead the end-to-end solution design for large, cross-functional digital initiatives, producing architecture blueprints, component-level designs, integration flows, and non-functional requirement (NFR) assessments aligned to business objectives and enterprise strategy.
  • Define and own the enterprise solution architecture standards, reference architectures, patterns (microservices, event-driven, API-first), and reusable components to accelerate delivery and reduce technical debt across multiple product teams.
  • Collaborate with C-level and business stakeholders to translate strategic business goals into technical roadmaps, evaluating trade-offs across cost, speed-to-market, risk, and maintainability.
  • Evaluate, recommend, and pilot cloud architecture choices (AWS, Azure, GCP), hybrid-cloud patterns, containerization (Docker), orchestration (Kubernetes), and serverless services to meet application and platform goals.
  • Drive migration strategies and execution plans for rehosting, replatforming, and refactoring legacy systems into cloud-native or modern hybrid architectures while mitigating operational and security risks.
  • Architect secure, scalable API strategies and integration patterns (REST, GraphQL, message buses, enterprise service bus, streaming) to enable composability and cross-domain data flow across enterprise systems.
  • Define data architecture principles and collaborate with data architects/data engineers on data models, data pipelines, master data management, and analytics platforms to ensure data quality, lineage, and accessibility.
  • Conduct architecture reviews, technical due diligence, and design workshops with engineering teams to validate solutions against enterprise standards and ensure compliance with security, privacy, and regulatory requirements.
  • Establish and enforce governance around software lifecycle, CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation), configuration management, and automated testing to improve deployment velocity and reliability.
  • Lead vendor evaluation, POC execution, and procurement support for middleware, integration platforms, identity providers (IAM), observability, and platform services, producing total cost of ownership (TCO) and ROI analyses.
  • Define and measure architecture KPIs (availability, latency, throughput, cost per transaction, operational overhead), and implement observability strategies using logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting frameworks.
  • Collaborate with Security and Compliance teams to embed security-by-design, threat modeling, encryption, identity management, least privilege access, and compliance controls (e.g., SOC2, GDPR, HIPAA) into solution architectures.
  • Provide technical leadership and mentorship to architects, tech leads, and engineers, fostering best practices in domain-driven design, testability, automation, and documentation.
  • Lead cross-team technical escalations and risk mitigations during design and run phases, providing pragmatic trade-off recommendations and contingency plans to preserve delivery timelines and system stability.
  • Create and maintain architecture artifacts: solution context diagrams, component and sequence diagrams, deployment topologies, runbooks, and decision records for auditability and knowledge transfer.
  • Design cost-optimized infrastructure and cloud consumption patterns, implementing tagging strategies, reserved/spot instance strategies, and autoscaling policies to control and optimize cloud spend.
  • Champion platform engineering initiatives such as internal developer platforms, CI/CD standardization, self-service infrastructure, and microservice governance to increase developer productivity and reduce time-to-market.
  • Ensure cross-functional alignment by facilitating architecture steering committees, stakeholder briefings, executive summaries, and regular architecture reviews with product, engineering, and operations leaders.
  • Drive interoperability and standardization across enterprise integrations including identity federation, data exchange formats, messaging contracts, and service-level agreements (SLAs).
  • Lead performance, capacity planning and scalability assessments; design for resilience with patterns like circuit breakers, retries, bulkheads and multi-region failover strategies.
  • Participate in proposal development and pre-sales support for strategic customers, translating technical capabilities into business value propositions and architecture options for prospective deals.
  • Continuously research and introduce emerging technologies (ML infra, edge computing, service mesh, observability platforms) and assess their applicability and risk profile to enterprise initiatives.

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.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Enterprise Architecture frameworks and practices (TOGAF, Zachman) and experience producing architecture artifacts and governance.
  • Cloud architecture and migration expertise across AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform (GCP) including compute, storage, networking, and managed services.
  • Strong experience with microservices, containerization (Docker), and orchestration platforms (Kubernetes, OpenShift).
  • API design and management (RESTful APIs, GraphQL, API gateways, versioning, contract testing).
  • Integration patterns and middleware: message queues (Kafka, RabbitMQ), ESB, event-driven architecture, and streaming platforms.
  • Infrastructure as Code and automation (Terraform, CloudFormation, Ansible) and CI/CD toolchains (Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions).
  • Security architecture, identity and access management (OAuth2, OIDC, SAML), encryption, and secure design principles.
  • Observability and monitoring tools (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK, Datadog, New Relic), distributed tracing (Jaeger, Zipkin).
  • Data architecture fundamentals: data modeling, ETL/ELT pipelines, data lakes/warehouses, and familiarity with Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery, or similar.
  • DevOps and platform engineering mindset with experience implementing developer self-service platforms, CI/CD best practices, and operational runbooks.
  • Performance engineering and capacity planning, including load testing tools and resilience patterns (circuit breakers, retries, bulkheads).
  • Scripting and programming proficiency in one or more languages (Python, Java, Go, or similar) to prototype solutions and review code-level design.
  • Cost optimization and cloud financial management (FinOps principles), tagging strategies and rightsizing.
  • Experience with governance, compliance standards, and regulatory frameworks relevant to enterprise operations.

Soft Skills

  • Excellent stakeholder management and communication: translate complex technical concepts into business language for executives and non-technical stakeholders.
  • Strategic thinking and problem-solving: balance short-term delivery needs with long-term architecture health and technical debt management.
  • Leadership and influence: lead cross-functional teams without direct authority and build consensus across product, engineering, security and operations.
  • Mentoring and team development: coach architects and engineers on best practices and architecture decision-making.
  • Negotiation and vendor management skills: manage third-party relationships, SLAs, and vendor selection processes.
  • Strong facilitation skills for architecture reviews, design workshops, and governance boards.
  • Adaptability and learning agility: quickly evaluate new technologies and incorporate practical pilots or proofs-of-concept.
  • Time management and prioritization: manage multiple concurrent initiatives and prioritize based on business impact and risk.
  • Analytical mindset: use metrics and data to inform architecture decisions and measure success.
  • Collaboration and empathy: work effectively across diverse teams and understand stakeholder constraints and goals.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

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

Preferred Education:

  • Master's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Business Administration (MBA), or related field.
  • Advanced certifications such as TOGAF, AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional, Azure Solutions Architect Expert, Google Professional Cloud Architect, or CISSP.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Software Engineering
  • Information Technology
  • Systems Engineering
  • Business Administration (for strategic roles)

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 8–15+ years of professional experience with at least 5 years in an architecture or lead technical role designing enterprise-scale solutions.

Preferred:

  • 10+ years in enterprise architecture, solution architecture, cloud transformation, or platform leadership roles.
  • Demonstrated track record designing and delivering complex, multi-year transformation programs, cross-functional integrations, or large-scale cloud migrations.
  • Experience in regulated industries (finance, healthcare, government) is a strong plus.
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