What is a Solution Architect: Responsibilities and Role on a Project

Use this Solution Architect job description to advertise your vacancies and find qualified candidates. It would be lovely to know everything you needed to know about any big life decision. But what if there were such a person who was not only a subject matter expert on a certain product or solution but also had your best interests at heart beyond the purpose of selling? They tend to be investigative individuals, which means they’re intellectual, introspective, and inquisitive. Some of them are also enterprising, meaning they’re adventurous, ambitious, assertive, extroverted, energetic, enthusiastic, confident, and optimistic. So, such constraints may significantly modify the product, affecting its time to market and cost.

what is the role of a solution architect

If you want to be a Solutions Architect, widen the reach of your skill sets. In your free time, read books on modern computing approaches, say, edge computing, chaos monkey, and service mesh technologies, for example. The reason I’m saying to do this is because you’re going to open your mind to other people’s conversation towards the advancement of their technology adoptions.

Solution architect job description

As for the business owners, it allows them to assess candidates’ tech knowledge and to define if they’re experienced enough to be involved in your project. The role of solution architects is to provide technical guidance to help clients build solutions that are secure, reliable, cost-optimized, and fault-tolerant. In various ways, this person establishes relations between business problems and tech solutions and drafts every requirement needed to make that solution work. Solution architecture is the underpinning for any IT project, regardless of whether you actually adopt this practice or not. By deliberately introducing solution architecture, you build the framework that aligns technology, resources, and skills with defined business goals. While a solution architect doesn’t directly get involved in project management, accounting for deadlines and given resources is inevitable.

what is the role of a solution architect

If you have already realized the importance of solution architecture in your projects, the next step is to source and hire the person for the role. We’ve considered the core skills that a good solution architect must possess. As a solutions architect, you’ll want to get certified in any relevant skills or technologies for your industry or field.

What is a solutions architect?

Simultaneously, they build prototypes to recognize tech limitations or jump onto the product design. Now, we will know what a solution architect does and his roles and responsibilities before and throughout the development process. A solution architect helps the development team understand the project’s vision and plays an important role all through the complete system development lifecycle. Furthermore, a solution architect starts too soon in the project with a plan to achieve. Usually, he begins picking the right technology for the business issues and handling architectural concerns to ensure the outcomes are more effective and productive. In our experience, solution architects can only be a benefit to companies who are struggling with projects that need to take off from the ground.

what is the role of a solution architect

They are sought-after across various industries, particularly in technology and consulting firms. In this article, we highlight the role of a solution architect and articulate how embracing this particular expertise can be instrumental in resolving business challenges. CTO at Emizentech and a member of the Forbes technology council, Amit Samsukha, is acknowledged by the Indian tech world as an innovator and community builder. He has a well-established vocation with 12+ years of progressive experience in the technology industry.

Software Business Models, Examples, Revenue Streams, and Characteristics for Products, Services, and Platforms

Contact Andersen for a solution architecture consulting in case you need more insights and a price calculation. Considering that this role entails negotiating with stakeholders, understanding the needs of all parties, managing risks, and product delivery, the lack of communication skills can create a real bottleneck. The position requires working closely with enterprise and software architects, business analysts, and project teams. So, an experienced solution architect should be able to listen, advise, empathize, and explain. A solution architect is responsible for designing and implementing solutions to complex business problems. They are typically hired by organizations to provide technical expertise and guidance in the development of software applications, systems, and other IT infrastructure.

First, they create a technical vision to show how the software will cover business needs. Next, they pass their tech vision to the development team who starts working on the solution. Let’s talk a bit more about solution architect responsibilities and roles before and during the development process. But solution architects aren’t the only architects when it comes to solution architect performance goals software development. What is a solutions architect, their roles and responsibilities, and how they’re different from software engineers and Project managers — find out in this article. Ultimately, technical architects define how the software must be engineered, while infrastructure architects make sure that this software is successfully deployed and operates well.

What is a Solution Architect: Responsibilities and Role on a Project

In other words, a solution architect looks at each piece of the tech puzzle both individually and all together, and then analyzes whether or not things are working well together. This role is essentially a compass for when technological planning and decisions need to happen. A solution architect provides information and guidance before a single line of code is written. Like the title itself implies, a solution architect quite literally looks for solutions. Solution Architect responsibilities include testing and integrating program software systems to address and solve specific business problems within an organization.

what is the role of a solution architect

In other words, solution architecture shows how a system and its specific features help a company reach its determined business goals. They take business requirements and transform them into new software solutions using the latest technology from the company. Their role is instrumental in driving the alignment between technology and business, ultimately leading to achieving organizational goals. A solution architect
This specialist thinks through the implementation of the selected solution or feasibility of a certain change in the tech ecosystem. Depending on the solution architect’s technical skills and area of expertise, there are several types of professionals, e.g. those who deal with networks, security, data, DevOps flows, or infrastructure.

Harness the Power of Technologies to Drive Business Growth in No Time!

Additionally, the remuneration is determined by the number of years of experience, technical proficiency, level of seniority, and soft skills. A solution architect bridges the gap between business problems and technology solutions. Someone in this role must be able to work with business leaders and have a vision of how things are supposed to look and operate.

  • Any project must meet the functional requirements and some non-functional requirements related to the characteristics of the system.
  • A solution architect’s expertise in identifying potential risks, selecting appropriate technologies, and designing scalable and maintainable solutions is crucial for the success of any IT project.
  • An architect is one of the most significant and client-facing roles in the IT industry.
  • Having a large-scale project may demand hiring a Solution architect as he will help with the management of software architects and the teams involved to emerge with a best-quality outcome.
  • In addition, the solution architect is responsible for ensuring that all requirements are met during development.

At the same time, they can create prototypes to identify tech limitations or delve into product design. You need to forge a link between the existing enterprise architecture and the particular project. Solution architects will guarantee the solution meets the standards of your company environment. Usually, companies already have operating systems, an information context, and integration requirements. 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.

Key Processes in Solution Architecture

The domain architect’s expertise lies in a particular tool, or domain, such as a specific CRM software or database technology. As the most in-depth of the architects, they are responsible for the technical structure of the respective systems and ensuring the proper implementation. Domain Architect\r\nThe domain architect is the most technical of all the roles during an implementation, with a more narrow scope of expertise. Solutions architects must be prepared to work with leaders, managers, and employees across every business unit.

Just as the ability of the Functional Analyst to create a requirements document is one part science and wrote procedure so is the creation of the architecture. Creating effective architectures to create a solution requires the careful balance of dozens of development concepts ranging from “Keep it Simple Stupid” to “Fail to Safe”. If you are creative, analytical, outgoing, pragmatic, and can explain problems and solutions on both a technical and non-technical level, you could have a future as a solutions architect. However, a solution architect is not involved directly in project development.

Defining and Communicating Architecture Vision

In many cases, the solution architect will just act as a support for the existing project manager leading a team. As such, how well they can do their job will involve a careful balancing act that juggles different personalities, goals, origins, and viewpoints. It’s worth pointing that a solution architect is not the same as an enterprise architect or a technical architect. Those three sound the same, so they are often mistaken for each other and are even used interchangeably in discussions. As the process is always heavy on the budget and highly risky, every company should have an architect to implement new solutions and scale them successfully. This specialist can be introduced to a company’s enterprise structure through software architecture consulting services.