What is a Solutions Architect? Role & Responsibilities

A software architect is a person who ensures that you spend money on tech solutions wisely instead of taking a shot in the dark. Specifically, they are responsible for bridging the gap between a company’s business strategy and the technical solutions it purchases or builds. A solution architect is sometimes confused with enterprise architect and software architect.

• This role also contributes to building and developing the organization’s data infrastructure and supporting the Management Team with insights, reports, and analysis for decision-making processes.
• It’s like hiring a super-senior developer but with deep expertise in a specific field — healthcare, education, traveling, or any other.
• Solution architects must be able to make decisions about which solutions are advantageous and which are worthless in a given situation.
• Conventionally, mid-size and small companies do not practice solution architecture.
• For instance, a professional with the same qualifications in the US earn between $142K and $238K per year.
• Cleveroad is a professional software development company that helps startups, SMBs, and enterprises deliver custom digital solutions that improve their performance and customer experience.

Individuals motivated by problem-solving, creating systems, and using technology to solve challenges, should consider a career as a solutions architect. If you want to become a solutions architect, then you should consider following the academic and career path outlined in this guide. The solutions architect works at the intersection of technology and business, so they need to be analytical and pragmatic in planning and problem-solving.

Who is an IT solution architect?

To meet these and other business requirements, the Customer needed their QMS modernized with properly managed back-end infrastructure, consistently monitored to ensure their services are highly available. Cleveroad is a professional software development company that helps startups, SMBs, and enterprises deliver custom digital solutions that improve their performance and customer experience. If you build landing pages, integrate small modules, or make minor improvements, you don’t need a solution architect. But if you aim at enterprise-level solutions or want to grow your existing product, you may want an IT solution architect to lead the process. Solutions architect skills include technical knowledge, communication, and leadership skills. These limitations may change the product a lot — and thus change its cost and time to market.

They will bring these solutions forward through white papers, presentations, and proposal responses. The successful candidate will be able to conceptualize these solutions around key business needs and goals in full awareness of industry trends. Of course, you don’t need to design and implement a solution architecture on all software development projects. For instance, if you want to create a simple one-page website, a coding team and a project manager will be able to do this without additional guidance from a solution architect’s side. Basically, they take separate requirements to the global company’s infrastructure and turn these requirements into real solutions. In other words, solution architects create a bridge between planning at the enterprise level and developing specific software products that will help a company make these plans a reality.

Solutions Architect responsibilities

Solution architects may work on multiple projects at the same time, which requires effective time management and prioritization skills. They may also be responsible for managing project budgets, timelines, and resources, ensuring that the solutions they design are delivered on time and within budget. The above solution architect’s responsibilities list can be supplemented with further duties depending on your objectives, team composition, and other factors.

The solution architecture helps ensure that a new system will fit the existing enterprise environment. To perform this task, a solution architect has to understand how all parts of the business model work together including processes, operating systems, and application architectures. Understanding these aspects, they will be able to design a specific solution that fits the environment best. Solution architecture describes how different components of business, information, and technology architectures are used in a particular solution. As solution architecture is more focused on details and solution technologies to address a specific business problem, it provides a channel between enterprise architecture and technical architecture. An effective approach for companies is combining enterprise architecture activities with solution and technical architecture activities.

Establish and maintain effective communication with stakeholders and vendors, and cross-functional internal teams

There is no set career path to becoming an SA, but most come from a background in architecture, project management, or software development. Solutions architects will use various tools https://www.globalcloudteam.com/ to develop their designs and diagrams. These tools – such as the LeanIX EAM – help SA’s map design IT infrastructure, produce diagrams and facilitate the to-be architecture.

Enterprise architecture defines the strategic directions of the business architecture, including the technology needed to support that architecture. On the other hand, a cloud architect will adopt plans, develop cloud application designs, and monitor cloud management. They oversee the application architecture and deployment within cloud environments (public cloud, private cloud, and hybrid cloud). They are monitoring a single application to understand the various interactions between the different components, and other business apps and can define limitations and requirements for source code. Solution architecture is one of the most important processes when redesigning your IT landscape.

Types of Solutions Architects: Specialization

Enterprise Architects focus on building complex enterprise ecosystems and solving high-level strategic issues. There are many solution architect certifications available to master a specific technology. The tech architecture strategy directly depends on the technology stack architects choose. It’s not really easy to find and hire a well-matching solution architect, as the market demand for accomplished specialists is enormous. If you want to hire an in-house member, the search process will take a while as you have limited access to professionals in your area.

There are a lot of IT architect certifications available, with most of them being vendor-specific, i.e., focused on mastering a specific technology. Use this Solution Architect job description to advertise your vacancies and find qualified candidates. The work you do for customers will also depend on where you’re working and what your tasks are, as well as where the customer is in their level of AWS adoption. They could be in the early stages so you’re having high-level talks, or farther along or even into the implementation.

Finalizing A Technology Stack

A Solutions Architect needs to be a good project manager because they are responsible for the overall design of the system, its integration with the existing systems, and its development. This requires them to manage all aspects of the project, plan the timeline, coordinate resources, and manage risks. This involves understanding the business goals and objectives and identifying the unique solution architect roles technology needs that must be addressed. A good Solutions Architect should have some experience in the product development process and understand the product life cycle. Solutions architects should be good product managers to effectively understand product requirements, user stories, and customer needs. Tech is about what you can practically do and less about what you read in college.

The responsibility of a solution architect is to pick the most suitable tools for a particular project. After developing a product roadmap, the solution architect is engaged in estimating the budget and introducing it to the stakeholders. Once everything is approved, SA traces the process of development and keeps clients tabs on the progress. During the development stage, the solution architect delves into each of the product areas.

How Enterprise Architects Close the Gap between Technology and Business

This is why it’s good to hire an architect since they can either do that before constriction or even check a building before adding on to it. If a company is not sure whether their building is structurally sound, it would be good to hire a property condition assessment service as well to see what they need to work on. Prior to considering solution architecture, we recommend exploring enterprise architecture frameworks that combine both solution and enterprise levels. While a solution architect doesn’t directly get involved in project management, accounting for deadlines and given resources is inevitable.