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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for IT Architect

💰 $110,000 - $180,000

IT ArchitectureEnterprise ArchitectureCloud ArchitectureSolution ArchitectureInfrastructure

🎯 Role Definition

As an IT Architect, you will design and govern high-availability, scalable, and secure enterprise and cloud architectures that align technology decisions with business strategy. You will partner with product owners, engineering teams, security, operations, and senior leadership to define solution blueprints, enforce architecture standards, drive cloud modernization, guide migrations, and validate non-functional requirements such as performance, reliability, security, and cost optimization. This role requires strong hands-on technical knowledge, proven architecture frameworks (TOGAF, Zachman), cloud expertise (AWS, Azure, GCP), integration and API best practices, and excellent stakeholder communication skills.

Keywords: IT Architect, Enterprise Architecture, Cloud Architecture, Solution Design, TOGAF, AWS, Azure, Migration, Microservices, API, Terraform, Kubernetes, Security, Governance.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Senior Software Engineer with architecture responsibilities
  • Solutions Architect or Cloud Engineer transitioning to enterprise-level design
  • Infrastructure Architect or Technical Lead with cross-functional design experience

Advancement To:

  • Enterprise Architect / Chief Architect
  • Head of Architecture / Director of Technology
  • CTO (for smaller organizations) / VP of Engineering (architecture track)

Lateral Moves:

  • Solution Architect (domain-focused, e.g., data, security)
  • Cloud Architect (specialized AWS/Azure/GCP)
  • DevOps/Platform Architect

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Develop and maintain the enterprise architecture roadmap and solution blueprints that translate business strategy into scalable, resilient, and cost-effective technology solutions; ensure alignment across application, data, integration, infrastructure, and security domains.
  • Lead solution design for complex, cross-functional initiatives including cloud migrations, data platform implementations, and large-scale integrations; produce architecture diagrams, component specifications, and interfaces that engineering teams can implement.
  • Define and enforce architecture governance, standards, and best practices (patterns for microservices, event-driven architectures, API-first design, CI/CD pipelines, IaC, and container orchestration) to reduce technical debt and improve maintainability.
  • Evaluate and select technology stacks, cloud services (IaaS/PaaS/SaaS), middleware, and commercial/open source products by performing proof-of-concepts, TCO analyses, and vendor comparisons; document trade-offs and implementation plans.
  • Architect secure solutions by specifying identity and access management (IAM), encryption strategies, network segmentation, secrets management, and compliance controls to satisfy regulatory and internal security requirements.
  • Design integration patterns and API strategies (REST, GraphQL, event buses, message queues) that support reliable, observable, and versioned interactions across distributed systems.
  • Create non-functional requirement (NFR) specifications for performance, scalability, availability, recovery time objectives (RTO/RPO), latency budgets, and capacity planning; validate designs through load testing and architecture reviews.
  • Drive cloud adoption and modernization strategies (rehost, replatform, refactor) including migration planning, pilot migrations, cutover strategies, and post-migration optimization focused on cost, performance, and resilience.
  • Establish infrastructure-as-code and automated provisioning standards (Terraform, CloudFormation, ARM templates) and guide engineering teams on modular, reusable templates for repeatable deployments.
  • Define observability and telemetry requirements (logging, metrics, tracing, alerting) and collaborate with SRE/Operations to implement monitoring, runbooks, and automated remediation strategies.
  • Collaborate with cybersecurity and risk teams to perform threat modeling, architecture risk assessments, and implement mitigations for identified vulnerabilities as part of the design lifecycle.
  • Lead architecture review boards and design reviews; mentor engineers and other architects on design decisions, trade-offs, and architecture principles to ensure high-quality deliverables.
  • Develop and maintain disaster recovery and business continuity strategies at the application and infrastructure level; design multi-region failover, backups, and data replication solutions.
  • Drive cost optimization initiatives across cloud and on-prem environments by analyzing consumption patterns, right-sizing resources, implementing autoscaling, and recommending committed use or reserved instances.
  • Provide technical direction during development and implementation phases, participate in sprint planning and code/design reviews, and validate that implemented solutions conform to architecture intent and standards.
  • Coordinate with data architects and data engineering teams to ensure data modeling, data lineage, governance, and storage strategies support analytics, compliance, and performance requirements.
  • Produce clear, concise architecture documentation, runbooks, and handover artifacts; communicate complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders and executive leadership.
  • Design identity and access strategies including SSO, RBAC/ABAC, federation, and lifecycle management integrations with enterprise identity providers (Okta, Azure AD).
  • Lead vendor engagement for third-party solutions, establish RFP/RFI requirements, evaluate proposals, and manage vendor relationships to ensure delivery against architectural goals.
  • Support regulatory compliance and audit activities by documenting controls, architecture decisions, and evidence of implementation for standards such as PCI-DSS, HIPAA, SOC2, GDPR.
  • Implement containerization and orchestration strategies (Docker, Kubernetes) with secure multi-tenant considerations, namespace isolation, and CI/CD integration for microservice deployments.
  • Architect hybrid and multi-cloud networking designs including VPN/Direct Connect, VPC/VNet peering, transit architectures, private connectivity, and network security configurations.
  • Provide technical leadership in incident response by participating in postmortems, identifying root causes, and incorporating lessons learned into architecture improvements.

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.
  • Assist in preparing business cases and ROI analyses for proposed architectural investments and modernization efforts.
  • Provide mentoring and training sessions to development teams on adoption of architecture patterns, cloud practices, and security hygiene.
  • Maintain and update architecture decision records (ADRs) and solution lifecycle artifacts to ensure traceability of decisions and assumptions.
  • Assist procurement and legal teams in technical evaluation of third-party contracts, SLAs, and software licensing considerations.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Enterprise architecture frameworks and practices (TOGAF, Zachman, or equivalent).
  • Cloud architecture and services (AWS, Azure, GCP): compute, storage, networking, serverless, managed databases.
  • Solution design for microservices, event-driven systems, and distributed architectures.
  • Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation, ARM templates) and automated provisioning.
  • Containerization and orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes (EKS/AKS/GKE) and cluster design.
  • API design and integration patterns (RESTful APIs, GraphQL, gRPC, message queues, Kafka).
  • CI/CD pipelines and DevOps toolchains (Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, ArgoCD).
  • Security architecture: IAM, encryption, network security, secrets management, threat modeling.
  • Databases and data architecture: relational (Postgres, MySQL), NoSQL (Cassandra, MongoDB), data warehouses and lakehouses.
  • Observability and monitoring tools (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK, Datadog, New Relic).
  • Networking and connectivity (VPC/VNet design, VPN, Direct Connect, load balancers, DNS).
  • Performance engineering, capacity planning, and large-scale system optimization.
  • Scripting and automation (Python, Bash, PowerShell).
  • Identity solutions and federation (Azure AD, Okta, SAML, OAuth2, OpenID Connect).
  • Cost management and cloud financial optimization (FinOps fundamentals).

Soft Skills

  • Strong communication and stakeholder management: translating technical trade-offs to non-technical audiences and executives.
  • Strategic thinking and business acumen: aligning technical roadmaps with business objectives.
  • Leadership and mentoring: guiding cross-functional teams, driving consensus, and influencing without direct authority.
  • Problem solving and analytical mindset with attention to detail in architecture reviews and decision records.
  • Facilitation and collaboration skills: conducting architecture review boards and technical workshops.
  • Adaptability and continuous learning: keeping up with emerging technologies and industry best practices.
  • Conflict resolution and negotiation skills when balancing technical debt, delivery timelines, and resource constraints.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

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

Preferred Education:

  • Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or MBA with technical focus.
  • Professional certifications such as TOGAF, AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional, Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert, or Google Professional Cloud Architect.

Relevant Fields of Study:

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

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 7 to 15+ years of progressively responsible experience in IT architecture, solution architecture, systems design, or related engineering leadership roles.

Preferred:

  • 10+ years designing and deploying enterprise-scale solutions across cloud and on-prem environments.
  • Proven experience leading cloud migration programs, multi-team architecture governance, and cross-functional technical initiatives.
  • Track record of delivering high-availability systems, implementing infrastructure-as-code, and establishing operational practices for observability and incident response.
  • Experience with vendor selection, RFPs, and third-party integrations in enterprise settings.
  • Prior exposure to regulated industries (finance, healthcare, government) and familiarity with relevant compliance frameworks is a plus.
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