Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Web Architect

🎯 Role Definition

This role requires a seasoned Web Architect to define, evolve, and govern the architecture of customer-facing and internal web platforms. The Web Architect is responsible for translating business goals into scalable, resilient, and secure web solutions that span frontend, backend, data integration, CDN, and cloud infrastructure. This role partners with product management, engineering leads, security, and operations to create a technology roadmap, design high-impact technical solutions (microservices, serverless, headless CMS, PWAs), and provide technical leadership for cross-functional teams. Strong emphasis on performance, accessibility, observability, and cost-efficient cloud operations.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Senior Frontend or Backend Engineer with multi-tier experience
Technical Lead, Staff Engineer, or Principal Engineer
Solutions Architect or Cloud Architect with web platform focus

Advancement To:

Lead/Principal Architect
Head of Architecture or Director of Engineering (Web Platforms)
Chief Technology Officer (CTO) or VP of Engineering

Lateral Moves:

Cloud Architect / Infrastructure Architect
DevOps / SRE Lead
Product Engineering Manager

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Lead the definition and continuous refinement of web architecture standards and reference designs, ensuring consistency across multiple product teams and aligning with enterprise technology strategy.
Drive the high-level design and technical roadmap for large-scale web platforms (multi-region, multi-tenant) including decisions on monolith vs microservices, modular frontends, and API-first patterns.
Architect and validate end-to-end solutions for customer-facing web applications, specifying frontend frameworks (e.g., React, Angular, Next.js), backend platforms (Node.js, .NET, Java, Go), and data persistence strategies.
Design scalable API strategies (RESTful and GraphQL) with formal versioning, contract testing, discovery, and API gateway patterns to support third-party integrations and partner ecosystems.
Specify and validate cloud-native deployment patterns (containers, Kubernetes, serverless) and recommend cloud providers and managed services (AWS, Azure, GCP) to meet resilience, cost, and compliance targets.
Define performance budgets and lead platform-wide performance engineering initiatives: page load optimization, critical rendering path, server-side rendering (SSR) or edge rendering, lazy loading, and CDN configuration.
Establish security architecture for web applications, including authentication & authorization (OAuth2/OpenID Connect), web application firewalls (WAF), secure data handling, and threat modeling aligned to organizational security policies.
Design observability and monitoring strategy: distributed tracing, metrics, logging, synthetic monitoring, and real-user monitoring (RUM) for web operations and incident response maturity.
Lead proof-of-concept (PoC) evaluations for new web technologies (edge computing, WebAssembly, headless CMS, PWA capabilities) and provide recommendations with cost-benefit analyses.
Define CI/CD pipelines and release strategies for web teams, including blue/green and canary deployments, feature toggles, automated testing, and release gating to reduce risk and accelerate delivery.
Create architecture artefacts: solution blueprints, sequence diagrams, interface contracts, deployment diagrams, and non-functional requirements (scalability, availability, latency, throughput) for stakeholder alignment.
Mentor engineering teams on architecture principles, code health, modular design, and best practices; conduct architecture reviews and provide actionable feedback to improve system maintainability.
Collaborate with product managers and business stakeholders to translate product requirements into technical epics, acceptance criteria, and costed implementation plans.
Define data flow, caching, and CDN strategies to minimize origin load and optimize global content delivery using edge caching, cache invalidation policies, and adaptive image/video delivery.
Drive cross-team efforts to standardize shared libraries, common components, design systems, and platform services that reduce duplication and accelerate development.
Manage technical debt by prioritizing refactors, modernization initiatives, and lift-and-shift strategies while balancing feature delivery and risk.
Evaluate and integrate authentication, personalization, and consent management solutions to support GDPR/CCPA compliance and scalable identity management.
Lead capacity planning and scalability testing for web workloads, define SLOs/SLIs, and work with SRE/ops teams to implement autoscaling and fault-tolerant patterns.
Partner with security, legal, and compliance teams to ensure web applications meet regulatory requirements and industry standards (PCI-DSS, SOC2, ISO).
Own vendor and third-party technology selection for CMS, CDN, APM, identity providers, and middleware, conducting RFPs and technical vendor assessments as needed.
Establish cost monitoring and optimization strategies for cloud-hosted web components to meet budget targets without compromising performance and reliability.
Provide on-call senior escalation support for architectural incidents, perform post-mortems, and drive systemic fixes to prevent recurrence.
Advocate for accessibility (WCAG), internationalization (i18n), and SEO best practices to ensure web products are discoverable, inclusive, and aligned with marketing objectives.
Drive automation for environment provisioning, configuration management, and secrets handling to improve deployment predictability and security posture.
Continuously research industry trends and produce architecture guidance and training materials to upskill engineering teams and keep the organization competitive.

Secondary Functions

Support ad-hoc performance investigations, incident triage, and root cause analysis for web production outages.
Contribute to the organization's web strategy and platform roadmap, aligning architecture choices with business KPIs and OKRs.
Collaborate with UX, QA, and operations to translate user research and testing outcomes into technical improvements.
Participate in sprint planning, architecture board meetings, and agile ceremonies to ensure architectural considerations are embedded in delivery.
Assist procurement and legal teams with technical evaluations and due diligence for third-party web technology contracts.
Create runbooks and architecture playbooks for common operational scenarios and emergency rollbacks.
Engage with developer communities and external partners to evangelize the platform, recruit talent, and represent the company at conferences or user groups.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

System and solution architecture for web platforms: microservices, modular monoliths, and serverless patterns.
API design (REST and GraphQL), API gateways, contract testing, and API versioning strategies.
Frontend architecture expertise with modern frameworks (React, Next.js, Angular, Vue) and performance optimization techniques (SSR, hydration, code splitting).
Backend architecture and languages/platforms such as Node.js, Java, .NET Core, Go, and integrative middleware.
Cloud-native design and operational knowledge (AWS, Azure, GCP) including managed services (RDS, DynamoDB, Cloud SQL, S3, Blob Storage).
Containerization and orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes, Helm, EKS/AKS/GKE patterns.
CI/CD pipelines and automation tools: Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, CircleCI, ArgoCD, FluxCD.
Observability and monitoring: Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, Jaeger, OpenTelemetry, Sentry.
CDN and edge technologies: CloudFront, Fastly, Akamai, edge functions, caching strategies, image optimization.
Security and identity: OAuth2, OpenID Connect, SAML, JWT, WAFs, SSL/TLS, secure coding practices and threat modeling.
Datastore expertise: relational databases, NoSQL (MongoDB, DynamoDB), caching (Redis, Memcached), search (Elasticsearch).
Performance engineering and load testing tools: Lighthouse, WebPageTest, JMeter, Gatling, k6.
Headless CMS and integration patterns: Contentful, Strapi, Sanity, or proprietary headless platforms.
Server-side rendering and edge rendering techniques; Progressive Web App (PWA) design patterns.
Familiarity with GraphQL servers, schema design, and resolver performance optimization.
Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC): Terraform, CloudFormation, ARM templates.
Cost optimization and cloud billing governance, tagging strategies and rightsizing.
Experience with authentication platforms and consent management (Auth0, Okta, Keycloak).
Knowledge of accessibility standards (WCAG) and SEO technical best practices for web architectures.

Soft Skills

Strong strategic thinking and the ability to translate business goals into technical roadmaps.
Excellent communication and stakeholder management — can present complex architecture decisions to technical and non-technical audiences.
Leadership and mentorship — experience guiding engineering teams and conducting architecture reviews.
Pragmatic decision-making and trade-off analysis balancing speed, quality, security, and cost.
Collaboration and cross-functional influence — works effectively across product, design, QA, security, and operations teams.
Problem-solving mindset and resilience under production incident pressure.
Curiosity and continuous learning orientation to evaluate new web technologies and trends.
Empathy for users and teammates, driving inclusive design and accessible web experiences.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

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

Preferred Education:

Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or an MBA with strong technical background is a plus.
Relevant cloud or architecture certifications (AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Google Professional Cloud Architect, Azure Solutions Architect).

Relevant Fields of Study:

Computer Science
Software Engineering
Computer Engineering
Information Systems
Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 7 - 15 years of professional experience in software engineering, with substantial time designing and delivering web platforms.

Preferred: 10+ years overall experience with at least 3–5 years in a formal architect, technical lead, or solutions architect role, including experience delivering enterprise-grade web applications, cloud migrations, and operating high-traffic production sites.