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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Oracle Cloud Solution Architect

💰 $ - $

CloudOracleArchitectureInfrastructureDevOps

🎯 Role Definition

The Oracle Cloud Solution Architect is a senior technical leader who partners with customers, product teams, and delivery organizations to design end-to-end Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) solutions. This role combines deep OCI technical expertise with solution design, migration strategy, cost optimization, security and governance best practices, and hands-on implementation oversight. The architect provides presales support, creates reference architectures, leads PoCs, and ensures successful cloud adoption by aligning technical decisions with business outcomes.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Senior Cloud Engineer (OCI/AWS/Azure)
  • Infrastructure Architect or Senior Systems Engineer
  • Database/Exadata Administrator or Cloud DBA

Advancement To:

  • Principal Cloud Architect / Enterprise Architect
  • Cloud Practice Lead or Head of Cloud Engineering
  • Director of Cloud Services / CTO (for SMBs)

Lateral Moves:

  • Cloud Security Architect
  • Multi-cloud Solution Architect
  • DevOps Platform Architect

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Lead the end-to-end design and delivery of complex Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) solutions, including compute, storage, networking, security, identity, database (Autonomous Database, Exadata Cloud Service) and platform services (PaaS/SaaS), ensuring alignment with customer business objectives and technical constraints.
  • Develop and present high-fidelity solution architectures, reference architectures, deployment blueprints, and migration plans for cloud-first and hybrid cloud initiatives that articulate clear trade-offs for performance, availability, security, and cost.
  • Own cloud migration strategies for legacy on-premises applications and databases to OCI, including lift-and-shift, re-platforming, refactoring for cloud native patterns, and database migrations to Autonomous Database and Exadata Cloud, providing risk assessments and roll-back plans.
  • Design secure, scalable OCI network topologies (VCNs, DRG, FastConnect, Load Balancers) and hybrid connectivity patterns with detailed routing, segmentation, and high-availability strategies to meet latency, throughput and compliance requirements.
  • Define and implement identity and access management solutions in OCI, integrating IAM/AD/SSO, fine-grained policies, compartment strategy, and least-privilege models to enforce governance and separation of duties.
  • Architect and implement enterprise-grade security controls on OCI using Security Zones, Web Application Firewall (WAF), Logging and Monitoring (OCI Logging, Monitoring, Events), Key Management, Vault, and vulnerability management processes to meet regulatory and industry standards.
  • Create and enforce cloud governance frameworks, tagging strategies, cost centers, billing and chargeback models, and automated policy enforcement using OCI Resource Manager, Terraform, and service-driven guardrails to manage drift and cost.
  • Drive infrastructure-as-code practices and CI/CD pipelines for OCI using Terraform, OCI Resource Manager, Git, Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD or similar tools to enable repeatable, auditable, and testable provisioning and application delivery.
  • Lead proof-of-concepts (PoCs) and pilot projects on OCI to validate technical assumptions, tune performance, and demonstrate business value; document results and recommend production-ready configurations and runbooks.
  • Provide technical leadership and mentorship to cloud engineers, DBAs, and operations teams during design, cut-over and post-migration stabilization phases, ensuring knowledge transfer and operational readiness.
  • Collaborate with security, compliance, and legal teams to address data residency, encryption, encryption key lifecycle, auditability, and compliance requirements (PCI, HIPAA, GDPR) for OCI deployments.
  • Evaluate and recommend cost optimization strategies on OCI, including right-sizing, reserved instances, autoscaling, tiered storage, and lifecycle policies while providing financial models and ROI analysis to stakeholders.
  • Integrate OCI native services with enterprise observability stacks (Logging, Monitoring, Application Performance Management) and implement proactive monitoring, alerting and runbook automation for incident response and SLO/SLI tracking.
  • Design high availability and disaster recovery architectures on OCI using multi-AD, cross-region replication, backup strategies, and orchestration to meet RTO/RPO targets and business continuity requirements.
  • Collaborate with product management, sales engineering and presales teams to create compelling technical proposals, architecture diagrams, estimate efforts, and respond to RFPs and security questionnaires with OCI-specific solutions.
  • Lead third-party technology evaluations and partner integrations (backup, SIEM, CASB, container management, service mesh) to complement OCI native capabilities and ensure interoperability and vendor lifecycle management.
  • Establish and drive automation and standardization of operational processes on OCI—provisioning, patching, backup, DR tests, and incident management—to reduce toil and increase repeatability in production operations.
  • Design and operationalize container and platform strategies on OCI (OKE, Kubernetes, Docker) including CI/CD for microservices, service discovery, ingress, secrets management and platform observability for cloud-native applications.
  • Provide technical oversight for database modernization initiatives to move from legacy RDBMS to Oracle Autonomous Database or Exadata Cloud Service, including schema conversion, performance tuning, backup/restore and data migration strategies.
  • Develop migration runbooks, cutover plans and validation test plans; coordinate cross-functional teams to execute migrations, manage risk during cutovers, and validate post-migration performance, availability, and security.
  • Drive continuous improvement by capturing lessons learned, producing architecture playbooks, templates, and reusable modules for OCI deployments to accelerate future implementations and reduce time-to-value.
  • Evaluate emerging OCI features and roadmap items, and recommend adoption patterns that align with the organization's strategic cloud roadmap and technical debt reduction.
  • Ensure scalable and auditable change management, configuration management, and environment segregation practices across dev/test/pre-prod/prod using OCI compartments, policies and automation.
  • Participate in incident and problem management for production OCI environments, lead root cause analysis, and implement remediation and preventative measures to improve reliability and operational maturity.

Secondary Functions

  • Support presales activities by preparing technical demos, cost estimates, and architectural collateral that clearly map business requirements to OCI capabilities.
  • Provide ongoing advisory support to customers and internal stakeholders on cloud best practices, OCI service selection, and modernization roadmaps.
  • Create technical documentation, runbooks, and training materials for engineering and operations teams to enable autonomous management of OCI environments.
  • Participate in architecture review boards, cloud governance councils and cross-functional working groups to align cloud strategy and standards.
  • Assist with vendor and partner coordination during solution delivery, including third-party tool integration and managed service engagements.
  • Support ad-hoc investigations into performance issues, security incidents, and capacity planning as subject matter expert for OCI.
  • Contribute to talent development by conducting knowledge-sharing sessions, workshops, and technical onboarding for new cloud hires.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) architecture and services expertise (Compute, Block/Object Storage, VCN, Load Balancer, FastConnect, DRG).
  • Oracle Database and Cloud Database technologies: Autonomous Database, Exadata Cloud Service, Oracle RAC, RMAN, Data Guard, GoldenGate.
  • Networking and hybrid connectivity: VCN design, routing, NAT, security lists, FastConnect, IPsec VPN and cross-region networking strategies.
  • Infrastructure-as-Code and automation: Terraform (preferred), OCI Resource Manager, Ansible, CloudFormation-like patterns for OCI.
  • CI/CD and DevOps toolchains: Git, Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD, OCI DevOps, Helm, ArgoCD, and container registry integration.
  • Container orchestration and platform services: OCI Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE), Docker, Kubernetes networking and service mesh patterns.
  • Security and identity: IAM, federation (SAML/OAuth), KMS/Key Vault, OCI Security Zones, WAF, encryption at rest & transit, and security best practices in cloud environments.
  • Observability and operations: OCI Logging, Monitoring, Events, Prometheus/Grafana, APM tools, and incident management/runbook authoring.
  • Scripting and programming: Python, Bash, or Go for automation, integration, and operational tasks.
  • Cost management and optimization: capacity planning, reserved instance strategies, TCO/ROI modeling and tagging strategies for cost transparency.
  • Data migration and ETL strategies: database migration tools, data replication, schema conversion, and ETL orchestration for large-scale migrations.
  • High availability and disaster recovery design: cross-AD/region replication, backup strategies, failover orchestration and RTO/RPO validation.

Soft Skills

  • Strong client-facing communication and presentation skills; able to explain complex technical concepts to business stakeholders and executives.
  • Strategic thinking with the ability to translate business requirements into pragmatic OCI solutions and roadmaps.
  • Leadership and mentorship: coach engineers, guide delivery teams, and influence cross-functional stakeholders.
  • Problem-solving and analytical mindset with attention to detail and a focus on measurable outcomes.
  • Effective time management and prioritization across multiple concurrent projects.
  • Collaboration and teamwork across sales, engineering, security, and operations stakeholders.
  • Negotiation and vendor management skills for third-party integrations and partner engagements.
  • Adaptability to evolving cloud services and fast-paced enterprise environments.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

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

Preferred Education:

  • Master's degree in Computer Science, Cloud Computing, or MBA with technology focus.
  • Oracle Certified: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Architect Professional or Associate, Oracle Database certifications.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Information Systems
  • Cloud Computing
  • Software Engineering
  • Network Engineering

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 5–12 years of progressive IT experience with at least 3–5 years focused on cloud architecture and solution delivery; demonstrated experience with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is strongly preferred.

Preferred: 8+ years overall experience with a proven track record of leading multiple full-lifecycle cloud migrations to OCI, hands-on implementation experience with Oracle Autonomous Database/Exadata, and experience working in enterprise or large-scale managed services environments.

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