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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for IT Solution Architect

💰 $120,000 - $190,000

ITSolution ArchitectureCloudEnterprise Architecture

🎯 Role Definition

The IT Solution Architect is a senior technical leader responsible for designing, validating and driving implementation of end-to-end technology solutions that deliver business value. This role blends enterprise architecture principles, cloud and on-premise design, integration, security, and operational readiness. The IT Solution Architect partners with product owners, engineering teams, security, operations and stakeholders to translate business requirements into scalable, secure, cost-effective architectures and implementation roadmaps.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Senior Software Engineer with systems design experience
  • Technical Lead / Engineering Manager with architecture responsibilities
  • Infrastructure Architect / Cloud Engineer

Advancement To:

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

Lateral Moves:

  • Cloud Architect (AWS/Azure/GCP Specialist)
  • Integration / Data Architect
  • Solutions Consultant / Pre-Sales Architect

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Design and own end-to-end solution architectures that meet business objectives, balancing functional requirements with non-functional requirements such as scalability, availability, performance, security and cost optimization across cloud (AWS/Azure/GCP) and on-premise environments.
  • Lead solution design sessions and workshops with stakeholders to translate business requirements into architecture blueprints, sequence deliverables, and measurable success criteria.
  • Define architecture principles, patterns, and standards (microservices, event-driven, serverless, containerization) and ensure engineering teams apply these consistently through reviews and governance.
  • Create and maintain detailed architecture diagrams, component interaction maps, data flow diagrams, and sequence diagrams to communicate designs to engineering and operations teams.
  • Evaluate and recommend technology platforms, third-party vendors, and open-source components; manage proof-of-concepts (POCs) and vendor evaluations to validate fit, cost, and technical risk.
  • Drive cloud migration and hybrid cloud strategies, including re-platforming, re-hosting or refactoring applications for cloud-native architectures and container orchestration (Kubernetes).
  • Define and enforce API and integration strategies: REST/GraphQL API design, API gateways, contract-first development, event streaming (Kafka), message queueing, and ESB patterns.
  • Ensure security and compliance by embedding identity and access management (IAM), encryption, secure data handling, threat modeling, and regulatory requirements (GDPR, HIPAA, PCI) into solution designs.
  • Collaborate closely with DevOps engineering to define CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, deployment strategies, infrastructure-as-code (Terraform/CloudFormation), and release orchestration.
  • Perform architecture reviews, code/design reviews and spike investigations to mitigate technical risk, reduce technical debt, and ensure maintainability and operability.
  • Produce cost estimates, total cost of ownership (TCO) analyses, capacity planning and performance budgets; recommend cost optimization strategies across compute, storage and data transfer.
  • Drive observability and operational readiness by specifying logging, metrics, tracing, alerting and runbooks; partner with SRE/ops to ensure reliable service-level objectives (SLOs) and incident response.
  • Manage cross-team dependencies and integration risks, coordinate delivery across multiple agile teams, and maintain solution roadmaps with clear milestones and delivery ownership.
  • Mentor and coach engineering teams, conduct training on architecture patterns and new technologies, and contribute to continuous improvement of engineering practices.
  • Lead technical discussions during pre-sales and RFP responses, creating solution proposals, architecture artifacts and technical ROI arguments to support commercial pursuits.
  • Define data architecture and collaborate with data architects on data modeling, batch/streaming pipelines, metadata, and governance to ensure data consistency and accessibility.
  • Establish disaster recovery, backup, business continuity and resilience strategies aligned to recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO).
  • Drive automation of infrastructure and platform provisioning, enabling self-service developer platforms and reducing lead time for changes.
  • Establish and enforce quality attributes for solutions including testability, observability, security, maintainability and extensibility; measure and report architecture health metrics.
  • Facilitate architecture governance: establish review boards, set acceptance criteria, approve major design changes and ensure architectures align to enterprise roadmaps.
  • Stay current with emerging technologies, industry trends and best practices (microservices, serverless, AI/ML integration, edge computing) and assess applicability to the organization.
  • Resolve escalated technical issues and provide decision-making support during incidents or critical production events.
  • Capture and document architectural decisions, trade-offs and rationale in decision records to ensure traceability and knowledge sharing.
  • Collaborate with procurement and legal teams to analyze vendor contracts, SLAs and licensing implications for architectural choices.

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 building architecture reference implementations, reusable components and internal frameworks to accelerate delivery.
  • Provide input to security and compliance audits and support remediation planning for architecture-related findings.
  • Participate in customer or partner technical workshops and joint architecture design sessions.
  • Maintain and update architecture repositories, knowledge base articles and onboarding documentation for new engineers.
  • Support performance testing efforts and tuning recommendations to validate architecture assumptions.
  • Advise on licensing, procurement and cost allocation for cloud and third-party services.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Cloud platform expertise: hands-on architecture and operational experience with AWS, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform (GCP) including compute, networking, storage, IAM, and managed services.
  • Solution design for microservices, event-driven architectures, serverless computing, and containerized applications (Docker, Kubernetes).
  • Strong API design and integration skills: RESTful APIs, GraphQL, API Gateway, OAuth/OpenID Connect, message brokers (Kafka, RabbitMQ), and ESB patterns.
  • Infrastructure-as-Code and automation: Terraform, CloudFormation, Ansible, or similar tools for repeatable and auditable provisioning.
  • CI/CD and DevOps pipelines: Jenkins, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions; experience building automated testing and deployment workflows.
  • Security architecture: identity and access management, encryption, secure key management, threat modeling and secure design patterns.
  • Data architecture and integration: familiarity with relational and NoSQL databases, data lakes, streaming platforms, ETL/ELT processes and data governance.
  • Observability and monitoring: Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK stack, Datadog, Splunk, OpenTelemetry for metrics, logs and distributed tracing.
  • System design and modeling: UML, C4 model, system decomposition, scalability and performance modeling, capacity planning.
  • Programming and scripting proficiency: at least one high-level language such as Java, C#, Python, Go, or Node.js to validate designs and POCs.
  • Enterprise architecture frameworks and governance: TOGAF, Zachman or equivalent experience establishing architecture standards and review processes.
  • Networking fundamentals: TCP/IP, load balancing, CDN, DNS, VPNs and hybrid network architectures.
  • Cost modeling and capacity planning skills to produce TCO, ROI, and cloud cost optimization recommendations.
  • Experience with identity platforms (Active Directory, Azure AD, IAM), SSO and federation technologies.

Soft Skills

  • Exceptional stakeholder management and communication skills to translate complex technical concepts into business-facing language.
  • Strategic thinking with the ability to align technical solutions to business objectives and measurable outcomes.
  • Strong leadership and influence to drive architectural decisions across distributed teams without direct authority.
  • Problem-solving mindset and the ability to make pragmatic trade-offs in ambiguous situations.
  • Collaboration and facilitation skills to run workshops, architecture reviews, and consensus-building sessions.
  • Mentoring and coaching to develop engineering capability and promote best practices.
  • Time management and prioritization with demonstrated ability to manage multiple concurrent initiatives.
  • Adaptability and continuous learning orientation to evaluate and adopt new technologies appropriately.
  • Negotiation and vendor management skills for working with third parties and procurement teams.
  • Detail-oriented and documentation-focused to maintain clear architecture artifacts and decision records.

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, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or MBA with a technical background.
  • Industry certifications (e.g., AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional, Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert, Google Professional Cloud Architect, TOGAF).

Relevant Fields of Study:

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

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 5–12+ years of professional IT experience with at least 3–5 years in architecture or technical lead roles.

Preferred:

  • 8+ years of experience designing and delivering enterprise-grade solutions across cloud and hybrid environments, with demonstrable experience in integration, security, DevOps and stakeholder leadership.
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