The most used title in architecture, and the one that can cause the amount of confusion.
Solution Architect is often the hardest role for someone new to architecture recruitment to understand, because at a certain level it can cover a huge number of architecture roles.
An Infrastructure Architect, an Integration Architect, a Cloud Architect and a Digital Architect (I could go on) can all be called Solution Architects, and a lot of the people with Solution Architect as their job title are reclassified at Konvergent.
Also seen as: Senior Solution Architect, Technical Solution Architect
A Solution Architect designs a solution end to end, from the business requirement through to the high level design of every layer that makes it work. They are the person who makes sure the application, data, integration and infrastructure decisions fit together. That is a very different job from getting any one of them right.
A Solution Architect usually comes from an applications or data background. They can point to solutions where they produced the high-level design and sometimes low-level designs across application, data, integration and infrastructure architecture, or at least three of the four. You should see a wide range of technologies, with no single area dominating the CV.
If the technologies in the CV are almost all infrastructure, you are looking at an Infrastructure Architect. If one product runs through every role, you are looking at an Application Architect. Neither is a lesser architect. But neither is the person you need when the job is to join everything together.
Also seen as: Senior Solution Architect, Head of Solution Architecture
These titles show seniority rather than a different job, and they vary a great deal between organisations. As a rule of thumb, a Lead Solution Architect is responsible for other architects on a large programme. A Principal Solution Architect is the most senior solution level authority in the organisation. They set standards and patterns that other Solution Architects follow, and they take on the solutions that carry the most risk.
Look for the size and risk of the solutions, not the title. You should see architects they have led or mentored, and design standards they have written. At this level, many will also have set up or chaired a Technical Design Authority. The solutions should be ones where a wrong decision would have been expensive, and they should have been the one making it.
Job titles inflate much faster than experience. A Principal Solution Architect at a 200 person software company and one at a high street bank are not the same hire. Look at what they were accountable for, not at what their business card says.
Also seen as: Delivery Architect, Programme Design Lead
The Programme Architect sees a programme through from start to finish. They will often do the initial feasibility, build the business case and manage the key relationships, and as the programme progresses they can move into an almost de facto delivery role. The architecture has to survive years of suppliers, scope changes and compromise, and they are the person who keeps it intact.
Look for feasibility studies and business cases they wrote themselves, multi-year programmes with a named value, and several suppliers or systems integrators. They should talk about architectural decisions they defended, and about the ones they conceded and why.
Because the role drifts towards delivery, some Programme Architects end up as very good project managers with a technical background. Ask them about a design decision they made, not one they managed. If every answer is about plans, risks and RAID logs, that tells you which way they lean.
Also seen as: Cloud Architect, AWS Solutions Architect, Azure Solutions Architect
The Cloud Solution Architect designs an end to end solution that runs in the cloud. They choose and combine managed services such as serverless functions, containers, managed databases, messaging and AI services, so that the application is scalable, resilient and affordable to run.
Look for solutions designed on AWS, Azure or Google Cloud with named services: Lambda or Azure Functions, Kubernetes or Container Apps, DynamoDB, Cosmos DB, Service Bus or SQS. You should also see thinking about cost, resilience and how the application behaves when a region goes down.
This is the most mis-tagged title in the market today, because the Cloud Infrastructure Architect often carries exactly the same title. The difference is simple once you look for it. The Cloud Infrastructure Architect builds the foundations: landing zones, networking, identity, security guardrails and infrastructure as code in Terraform or Bicep. The Cloud Solution Architect builds the solution that sits on top of them. Ask what they would do on their first day. One will talk about the landing zone. The other will talk about the application. It is also worth knowing that at Microsoft and AWS, “Cloud Solution Architect” and “Solutions Architect” are often customer facing technical sales roles. Those can be excellent people, but they are not always the same as a delivery architect.
Also seen as: Digital Architect, Composable Architect
The Digital Solution Architect designs customer facing digital channels, often on headless and composable platforms. Because so much of that work is joining separate services together through APIs, we have defined the role in full on our Integration Architecture page, including how it overlaps with the Integration Architect.
If you are hiring for a solution architecture role and are not sure which of these you actually need, please get in touch. It is surprisingly common for the job description to describe one of these roles while the job title asks for another.
Ben Clark
bclark@konvergent.co.uk
