Solution architect role description and responsibilities:

This is an excellent opportunity to design and develop solutions to complex applications problems, system administration issues, and or network challenges.

The solution architect's job focuses on solution-level decisions and analysis of their impact on the overall business goals and outcomes. Just like an architect in the construction industry creating a general blueprint of a future building, the person in this role must have a profound knowledge of available technologies (AWS. AZURE, .net, Oracle, C++, etc...) to suggest the best solution according to the incoming requirements and existing environment. What is paramount and the cornerstone of a solution architect's job is the set of technological solutions and the strategy of their implementation.

After developing a strategic technical vision of the product/project, the solution architect gets involved in:

• Estimating the budget and presenting it to stakeholders
• He or She helps monitor and actively participates in the development process
• He or She also helps keep stakeholders informed about progress
• Incorporates engineering strategies for introducing new technology into the NRO's infrastructure-related business processes
• Develops future technology and architectural advancements to support architectural strategy, technology migration, and integration and evolution
• Coordinate, review, and integrate the deliverables of information and technology architects into cohesive solutions architectures
• Design all data solutions in alignment with applicable policies, standards, and practices
• Provide creative and innovative architectural solutions to ill-defined requirements
• Review and assess impact of proposed scope changes to future architectures
• Support the development and maintenance of data models, data dictionaries, data maps and other architecture artifacts across the enterprise
• Analyzing the technology environment
• Analyzing enterprise specifics
• Analyzing and documenting requirements
• Setting the collaboration framework
• Creating a solution prototype
• Participating in technology selection
• Controlling solution development
• Supporting project management

While most of these responsibilities require a leadership role from a solution architect, this person just supports PM activities to ensure that resources, risk recognition, and planning stay aligned with the solution goals.

Solution architect skillset and background:

Technical background and experience will include being able to provide management and engineering teams with technical advice, a solution architect must have a technical background with at least eight years of work experience in one or more IT areas including but not limited to:

• IT architecture, infrastructure, and cloud development
• Engineering and software architecture design
• Business analysis
• DevOps
• Project and product management

Excellent communication skills

A vital part of the solution architect's competence is communication. 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 techies/architects, business analysts, and project teams. An experienced solution architect should be able to listen, advise, empathize, and explain.

Deep analytical skills

Designing a solution requires understanding how different parts of the business work together. The architect must recognize the corporate strategy and realize all business processes that define how a company achieves its strategic goals. But the architect must also understand tech specifics. As a result, solution architects constantly deal with analytical work and move between various business layers.

Project and resource management skills

While a solution architect doesn't directly get involved in project management, accounting for deadlines and given resources is inevitable. Solution architects must be able to make decisions about which solutions are advantageous and which are worthless in the particular situation. They must be focused on business results and understand how to achieve them according to the given timeframes and resources.

Besides that, it's important that solution architects consider the project in a long-term perspective and understand that the solution might need to scale and adapt to possible changes in the future. So, being the one who knows the ultimate target, they guide the development process accordingly.

Solution architect certification

Certifications are intended to validate the skills and expertise of the solution architects. They assess their knowledge, abilities, and experience. So, having one or more credentials proves the expert's proficiency in specific skills.

There are a lot of IT architect certifications available, with most of them being vendor-specific, i.e., focused on mastering a specific technology. The "Holy Grail" would be someone with an ITIL Certification and a cloud technology cert like:

* AWS Certified Solutions Architect (associate or professional level)

* Microsoft Certified Azure Solutions Architect