What Does A Solutions Architect Do?

WHAT DOES A SOLUTIONS ARCHITECT DO?

Published: Jan 05, 2026 - The Solutions Architect prepares and presents architectural artifacts, leads technology solution design, and advises senior leaders with expert guidance across the enterprise. This role involves collaborating with stakeholders to provide strategic recommendations, assess risks, ensure alignment with business goals, and support successful solution implementation. The Architect also researches emerging technologies, develops architecture assets, and strengthens organizational capability through mentorship and knowledge sharing.

A Review of Professional Skills and Functions for Solutions Architect

1. Solutions Architect Duties

Proposal Management: Prepare proposals involving multiple parties, stakeholders, and workflows.
Estimation Planning: Perform estimation and scope decomposition.
Risk Analysis: Conduct risk assessment and define dependencies and assumptions.
Technical Architecture: Create technical specifications and architecture vision documentation.
Technology Evaluation: Perform technology assessments and comparisons.
Technical Leadership: Lead discovery phases and workshops covering all technical aspects of the deal.
Prototyping Delivery: Create prototypes and proof of concepts and deliver presentations to stakeholders.
Solution Implementation: Define and create core components during the implementation phase and transfer knowledge to the development team.
Process Innovation: Develop new technological practices for the company.
Architect Collaboration: Cooperate with top solutions architects in the company.
Industry Engagement: Participate in international events.
Knowledge Research: Access the knowledge base of the Software Engineering Institute.

2. Solutions Architect Details

Sales Support: Support the sales and quotation teams by analyzing customer quotation requirements.
Customer Engagement: Participate efficiently in engagements with customers, EPCs, and process OEMs.
Cross-Team Collaboration: Collaborate closely with the power systems optimization team, services, and Industrial Automation teams.
Proposal Optimization: Contribute technical input to optimize customer proposals.
Technical Positioning: Ensure proposals are positioned to be technically sound and commercially competitive.
Solution Alignment: Align proposed solutions with client drivers such as sustainability, efficiency, and digitization.
Order Growth: Actively support the growth of segment order intake for green metals and traditional metals businesses.
Opportunity Enablement: Enable pull-through opportunities across related offerings.
Partner Relationships: Build and strengthen long-term relationships with OEM and partner organizations.
Solution Architecture: Serve as the solution architect for assigned opportunities.
Offering Innovation: Continuously innovate and enhance existing offerings to meet evolving market needs.

3. Solutions Architect Responsibilities

Requirements Alignment: Work with relevant business units to establish a set of requirements, align with tech debt, and help build a delivery roadmap.
Solution Design: Design solutions for new problem statements, such as natural language query processing for self-serve requirements and real-time data visualization.
Design Communication: Present the design in multiple review forums, socialize, and build consensus.
Proof Leadership: Lead the team to build proof of concept for new ideas and experiments.
Implementation Leadership: Lead the team in solving roadblocks and guide implementation.
Code Review: Review code and verify design conformance.
Risk Ownership: Own security and other types of risk and guide the team to improve deliverable quality.
Vendor Coordination: Communicate with the vendor to select the right product and integrate by improving the needed feature.

4. Solutions Architect Accountabilities

Strategic Planning: Perform strategic planning and analysis, and prepare summaries and operational activities enabling the exploitation of markets.
Project Coordination: Perform project coordination in assigned projects and supply information for the development of new strategies.
Market Analysis: Perform analysis of strategic business segments and evaluate opportunities for new or existing products in new markets, channels, or customer target groups.
Vendor Management: Perform the management and coordinate the activities of external vendors.
Business Strategy: Contribute to the development of a unit business strategy.
Forecast Management: Manage the development of strategic planning tools and provide and review consolidated business forecasts.
Portfolio Management: Collect portfolio requirements across the regional sales force.
Strategic Contribution: Contribute to various projects with a strategic perspective.
Program Management: Drive and monitor key business development programs.
Organizational Support: Support the assigned organization and collaboration within and across units.
Sales Effectiveness: Support the effectiveness of sales organizations via strategic initiatives or projects.

5. Solutions Architect Functions

Trusted Advisory: Act as a trusted advisor to systems integrators as a member of the solutions architect team.
Technical Leadership: Act as a technical leader in the field to provide architectural guidance and recommendations necessary to promote and accelerate partner engagements worldwide.
Customer Success: Ensure customer and partner success in designing, building, and migrating applications, software, and services on the platform.
Cloud Architecture: Lead architectural discussions and design exercises to create world-class solutions while ensuring solutions are designed for successful deployment in the cloud.
Platform Evangelism: Be an evangelist and educate customers and partners of all sizes on the value proposition of the platform.
Technical Writing: Author or contribute to customer-facing publications such as white papers, blogs, and proof of concepts.
Sales Strategy: Formulate and execute a sales strategy in partnership with the sales and partner team to exceed revenue objectives through the adoption of platform and partner solutions.
Relationship Building: Build relationships with senior technical individuals within customers and partners to enable them to be cloud advocates.
Knowledge Sharing: Capture and share best-practice knowledge amongst the solutions architect community.

6. Solutions Architect Overview

Customer Acceleration: Work directly with customers to accelerate projects and recommend best-practice architectures aligned with long-term business outcomes.
Technical Ownership: Own the technical relationship with the customer and operate as a trusted advisor, ensuring guidance reflects the best interests of the customer.
Customer Advocacy: Share the voice of the customer to influence the roadmap of new features and services for the platform.
Technical Content: Create and capture best practices, technical content, and new reference architectures, including white papers, code samples, and blog posts.
Technology Evangelism: Evangelize and educate about platform technology through workshops, user groups, meetups, public speaking, online videos, or conferences.
Team Development: Contribute to the growth of the solutions architecture organization by hiring, coaching, and mentoring others.
Technical Expertise: Develop areas of depth in technical domains relevant to personal interests and customer outcomes.
Ecosystem Collaboration: Collaborate within the startup ecosystem, including accelerators, incubators, investors, and meetups, to educate startups and support growth.

7. Solutions Architect Details and Accountabilities

Technical Consulting: Act as a technical consultant and subject matter expert on Facebook’s marketing technology solutions.
Client Support: Support marketing organizations at leading innovative companies.
Platform Implementation: Guide clients toward optimal implementations of Facebook’s advertising platform.
Technical Communication: Explain technical details of advertising products clearly and practically.
Solution Alignment: Ensure implementations align with client marketing objectives and technical constraints.
Sales Collaboration: Work closely with sales teams to identify and unlock new business opportunities.
Business Understanding: Develop a deep understanding of the client's business goals and industry trends.
Solution Translation: Translate business needs into effective marketing technology solutions.
Industry Representation: Represent Facebook’s marketing technology expertise at industry conferences.
Executive Presentation: Present technology-driven insights to executive-level audiences to influence the marketing industry.

8. Solutions Architect Tasks

Technical Contact: Serve as the technical point of contact for assigned accounts and account managers in the territory.
Customer Insight: Develop a deep understanding of customer goals and objectives and articulate how the offerings address their needs.
Value Relationships: Create and own value-based relationships at all levels in customer organizations.
Sales Execution: Actively participate in all phases of planning and execution for the territory from initial discovery to the technical win.
Product Expertise: Develop and maintain a deep understanding of the products and solutions to demonstrate value in sales meetings and at events such as meetups and conferences.
Sales Advisory: Advise the sales team on effective ways of positioning products, solutions, and services.
Partner Enablement: Onboard, educate, and enable partners and support them in sales cycles.
Content Collaboration: Create collateral, contribute to programs, and collaborate with colleagues to meet individual client needs.
Customer Advocacy: Be the voice of the customer and community to communicate needs, gaps, and enhancements to engineering and leadership teams.
Professional Development: Deepen both sales and technical skills through self-driven education while taking advantage of available professional development opportunities.

9. Solutions Architect Roles

Architecture Standards: Develop cross-product frameworks and best practices, and design, establish, and maintain technical architecture standards.
Solution Design: Create, design, and document solutions to product specifications for shared capabilities throughout the architecture.
Developer Mentorship: Mentor developers by providing technical and non-technical help and oversight.
Sales Enablement: Support sales executives in understanding and delivering the product.
Release Planning: Support product release planning and assess feature viability and effort.
Requirements Analysis: Work with the product team to understand requirements and create functionality specifications.
Release Oversight: Oversee the deployment of alpha and beta releases during the stabilization of new product development.
Technical Documentation: Assist in writing the technical section of functional specifications for new product development.
Development Standards: Define and evolve development standards, guidelines, procedures, processes, and metrics.
Code Review: Facilitate code reviews by highlighting best practices and steps for increased stability and capability.

10. Solutions Architect Additional Details

Enterprise Vision: Collaborate with product development teams to provide a high-level vision of enterprise solutions and development initiatives.
Strategy Communication: Understand and communicate the enterprise strategy to application, data, and solution architects, along with other non-technical stakeholders.
Innovation Analysis: Collect, generate, and analyze innovative ideas and technologies for use across the business.
Certification Strategy: Provide a strategy to meet certification requirements for all products and solutions in the audit and assurance portfolio.
Cost Estimation: Prepare large enterprise system development cost estimates, budgets, and schedules.
Platform Strategy: Participate in the strategy for building and maintaining the development platform along with modeling, design, and coding practices.
Architecture Governance: Monitor the architecture and design creation process and review project artifacts.
DevOps Promotion: Promote continuous integration, continuous deployment processes, and DevOps capabilities.
Performance Evaluation: Evaluate results within the business unit to determine if organizational objectives are being met.

11. Solutions Architect Essential Functions

Technical Sales: Serve as a technical sales specialist and subject matter expert on process systems and solution offerings, and applications.
Solution Development: Collaborate with account managers or work independently to develop solutions to customer objectives using the solutions-selling process.
Control Design: Design, develop, configure, and implement a control strategy based on inputs such as P&ID instrument drawings, design specifications, or bid packages.
Proposal Development: Work with team members to develop proposals.
Sales Strategy: Lead and collaborate on sales and technical strategy for elements including subcontracts, bill of materials, procurement, fabrication, configuration, site installation, commissioning, and startup.
Territory Coverage: Cover a territory spanning Southern California from Kern County to the Mexican border.
Industry Support: Support all process industries in the territory, including life sciences, oil and gas, engineering procurement construction, food and beverage, consumer packaged goods, chemical, refining, and water or wastewater.

12. Solutions Architect Role Purpose

Product Vision: Work with product management to create and validate inspiring platform or product visions derived from business needs, market opportunities, and technology trends.
Solution Decomposition: Decompose business requirements and customer experiences into logical solution designs that drive the platform or product roadmap.
Technical Delivery: Deliver platform product and associated artefacts that set the standard for engineering excellence and technical product management, including API designs, solutions architecture definitions and specifications, and contributions to industry specifications such as EMVCo and W3C.
Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work with technical program managers, developers, UX designers, and internal customers to define the details behind the business requirements.
Customer Advocacy: Act as the voice of the business customer and be accountable for multiple product platform domain services.
Domain Expertise: Dive deep into the domain and competitive landscape to lead company-wide decision-making for the platform product domain.
Design Consulting: Consult with others on design reviews, product requirements, and acceptance criteria.
Goal Alignment: Ensure technical, customer, and business goals are aligned with business requirements.
Trade-off Analysis: Balance trade-offs between competing interests using judgment, data, and experience.
Problem Solving: Tackle hard problems in new spaces, bring clarity to ambiguity and complexity, and demonstrate ways to simplify.

13. Solutions Architect General Responsibilities

Opportunity Evaluation: Evaluate opportunities through technical levers to qualify the sales pipeline and convince potential customers in competitive environments.
Proposal Integration: Develop and integrate cross-product proposals to structure commercially creative contractual solutions for integrated offerings.
Discovery Leadership: Conduct full-form discovery workshops for key customers to uncover enterprise opportunities.
Business Development: Lead business development and commercialization for new products in the region, focused on strategy development and growth opportunities based on market or customer research, and tracking performance of campaigns or initiatives.
Site Assessment: Conduct site walkdowns and asset condition monitoring solution assessment surveys.
Value Proposition: Create and deliver a customer value proposition through a consultative and advisory model.
Solution Design: Conduct solution design creation with articulation of pros and cons from buyer and seller perspectives.
Use-Case Alignment: Leverage collaborative use-case workshop models during discovery and qualifications to achieve maximum alignment of portfolio offers with customer needs.
Sales Strategy: Assist regional sales leaders with developing and executing sales strategies relevant to the market using techno-strategic levers aligned with market outcomes and trends.
Engineering Scoping: Develop engineering and installation technical work scopes, schedules, and cost estimates to facilitate offerings in the area of expertise.
Technical Training: Educate sales, services, and ITO teams on the latest technology through training and workshops.

14. Solutions Architect Key Accountabilities

Trusted Advisory: Be a trusted advisor and engage with technical architects and business stakeholders to provide high-quality technical solutions and product training to drive successful customer outcomes.
Process Alignment: Link business processes with product technical solutions.
Delivery Execution: Execute delivery methodology to drive projects to completion on time and on budget.
Issue Resolution: Troubleshoot key customer implementation issues and demonstrate the ability to drive successful resolution.
Solution Prototyping: Prototype and catalog new solutions to fit business pain points.
Architecture Consulting: Consult on architecture, indexing, searching, and UI best practices.
Account Expansion: Expand relationship and product usage within the enterprise segment.
Roadmap Alignment: Engage in customer calls and on-site visits to help inform and align on product roadmaps for future partnership growth.
Action Planning: Aid in the development of a detailed action plan, roadmap, prototype, final recommendation document, SM action plan, and retrospective.
Internal Partnership: Partner with the success management, engagement manager, and other internal roles to understand project goals and deliverables.
Content Reusability: Create and increase the reusability of solutions content, such as blog posts, workshop tutorials, tooling, and internal projects.
Engagement Scaling: Build out tooling and collateral to help scale customer engagement.
Customer Advocacy: Inform and evolve the product ecosystem by listening and advocating for customers' technical needs.
Engineering Coordination: Work with engineering to track and resolve feature requests and bugs.
Product Alignment: Meet with the product team to stay informed on the latest changes to the ecosystem and disseminate updates internally and to customers.

15. Solutions Architect Roles and Details

Solution Delivery: Deliver product solutions for urban mobility across targeted regions, including deployment of contactless and app-based acceptance solutions in transit and other mobility sectors.
Pipeline Management: Actively manage the pipeline of clients, ecosystem providers, and solutions providers across Central Europe markets.
Global Collaboration: Work closely with global and regional hub teams to help scale projects and expand adoption by understanding and addressing associated impacts and requirements.
Adoption Strategy: Drive solutions adoption and explore commercial opportunities to scale and distribute offerings that broaden urban mobility acceptance in new payment flows, new acceptance locations or verticals, and expansion in existing markets.
Implementation Ownership: Own the implementation of new urban mobility solutions across the targeted project list by providing critical local knowledge and insights in close support of global urban mobility initiatives and leveraging local product and acceptance teams.
Post-Implementation Support: Provide post-implementation support.
Stakeholder Collaboration: Collaborate with industry and internal stakeholders across the organisation to understand market needs and improve solutions with enhancements that lead to better competitiveness, along with pricing impacts and go-to-market requirements.
Product Innovation: Provide input to the product innovation process with a focus on improvements in existing frameworks.
Performance Reporting: Provide regular updates and reporting to leadership levels on key metrics and objectives, and adapt programme tactics and strategies to address challenges, issues, or opportunities.
Market Analysis: Review market activity to ensure propositions remain differentiated and compelling.
Leadership Support: Support key priorities and initiatives from regional and European leadership.

16. Solutions Architect Responsibilities and Key Tasks

Pre-Sales Automation: Provide front and back office pre-sales automation technical support for the sales organization.
Sales Engineering: Be part of a team and serve as the technical arm of the sales team to support the technical aspect of the opportunity, including job walkthroughs, scope, and potential BOMs.
Customer Visits: Visit customers with sales teams, channel partners, or proactively on your own.
Solution Support: Assist and support end users, system integrators, and consulting engineers on automation solutions for project opportunities.
Architecture Promotion: Introduce and promote complete PlantStruxure architectures.
Demo Development: Build demos to help the customer visualize the main solution concepts as proof of concept.
Technical Interface: Be the main technical customer interface for the system and solutions.
Architecture Advisory: Provide expert support and lead system and architecture definition with the customer, creating value by advising on principles, feasibility, limits, constraints, and performance.
Legacy Migration: Provide recommendations and support for migration from or interconnectivity with legacy offers.
Technical Integration: Answer deep technical questions on the integration and compatibility of components within an architecture.
Deal Support: Help close the deal by providing differentiating elements to sales for commercial argumentation and explaining the technical advantages and disadvantages of proposed architectures as a value proposition.
Expert Collaboration: Work closely with other technical experts locally and globally to provide the customer with the best solution.
Requirements Analysis: Obtain detailed requirements and constraints from the customer and assist in defining the best implementation by validating, optimizing, and differentiating selected system architectures.
Architecture Selection: Select the most appropriate architectures and hardware to meet customer requirements and adjust and optimize architectures accordingly.
Job Walkthroughs: Provide job walkthroughs for solution opportunities.

17. Solutions Architect Duties and Roles

Architecture Artifacts: Prepare and present architectural artifacts.
Strategic Advisory: Provide strategic input into business decisions as a trusted advisor.
Stakeholder Guidance: Work with internal stakeholders to offer architectural recommendations, guidance, and departmental presentations.
Design Leadership: Lead and facilitate the design of technology projects and applications.
Subject Expertise: Act as the prime subject matter expert for internal and external stakeholders.
Quality Review: Review technical work for quality and alignment.
Productivity Enablement: Develop and recommend productivity aids to accelerate delivery.
Architecture Management: Create and manage key architecture assets for the designated portfolio and business scope.
Solution Assurance: Ensure sound and robust architecture and provide sufficient guidance to support successful solution implementation and mitigate negative impacts on enterprise technology and budget.
Risk Management: Identify risks or issues with technology solutions and designs that may affect project benefit realization and support stakeholders in resolving or mitigating potential risks or delays.
Specification Review: Participate in the system specification review process to confirm that system requirements translate into a valid software architecture.
Technology Research: Identify and research relevant technologies, perform proofs of concept and prototypes, and recommend applications of these technologies for future product architecture.
Business Case: Provide input into the preparation of business cases.
Capability Building: Identify opportunities to strengthen the capability of the technology organization by sharing expertise, mentoring, building communities of practice, and establishing networks.
Trend Awareness: Stay abreast of industry, technical, and business trends through participation in professional associations, communities of practice, and individual learning.
Executive Advisory: Provide architectural expertise and domain knowledge to advise and guide senior leaders.
Enterprise Scope: Operate at a group or enterprise-wide level and serve as a specialist resource to senior leadership and stakeholders.
Change Leadership: Implement changes in response to shifting trends.

18. Solutions Architect Roles and Responsibilities

Executive Engagement: Engage at the executive level with customers and internal teams to understand ambitions, goals, and existing sustainability strategy.
Sustainability Strategy: Use experience in sustainability to help shape customer ambitions and identify pathways toward greater impact across environmental, societal, and economic environments.
Strategy Synthesis: Synthesize the complex nature of sustainability strategy in customers to align with available capabilities and value offerings.
Digital Enablement: Identify and apply the potential achieved from the adoption of digital technology to advance sustainability goals.
Domain Expertise: Use deep experience in one or more sustainability areas to help extend customer ambitions and innovate with new approaches.
Expert Orchestration: Leverage a team of experts across internal teams and partners to bring focused expertise into customer conversations to drive impact.
Solution Development: Develop and recommend highly impactful solutions for advancing a customer sustainability agenda while managing risks and consequences.
Consulting Growth: Identify and build commercial consulting opportunities through deep relationships with strategic customers.
Value Articulation: Clearly identify and articulate business benefits to sustainability initiatives, describe the pros and cons of possible options, and document evidence in support of claims.
Resource Mobilization: Identify and gather resources across internal and external communities to ensure a positive impact of initiatives.
Strategic Communication: Communicate the strategic perspective on key sustainability issues.
Internal Alignment: Understand and apply detailed knowledge of internal strategies to drive results and customer outcomes.
Technology Application: Develop recommendations for how customers can use technology to solve societal issues and create opportunities.
Event Advocacy: Participate in large internal and external events to advocate for the ability to help enterprise customers with sustainability goals.
Partnership Development: Embrace partnerships such as niche consultancies, global integrators, and solution vendors to advance customer and internal objectives.
Partnership Expansion: Extend partnership opportunities based on customer and stakeholder feedback.
Internal Networking: Establish and maintain an internal network of resources to assist in solving customer challenges.
Product Alignment: Engage across product engineering groups to align customer objectives with product roadmaps and influence future product direction.
Project Governance: Participate in intra-group and cross-group projects and ensure accountability by leveraging project management approaches.
Issue Escalation: Escalate intra- and cross-group misalignment.
Stakeholder Influence: Proactively collaborate with and influence internal stakeholders across functions to ensure mutual understanding and alignment of objectives, priorities, and resources.

19. Solutions Architect Duties

Specialist Knowledge: Maintain active knowledge in one or more identifiable specialisms.
Expert Advisory: Provide detailed and specific advice regarding the application of specialisms to organizational planning and operations.
Knowledge Boundaries: Recognize and identify the boundaries of individual specialist knowledge.
Specialist Collaboration: Collaborate with other specialists to ensure advice aligns with organizational needs.
Research Development: Build on and refine appropriate research ideas within given research goals, including evaluation, development, demonstration, and implementation.
Data Analysis: Apply standard methods to collect and analyze quantitative and qualitative data.
Research Reporting: Create research reports to communicate methodology, findings, and conclusions, and contribute publication-quality material.
Knowledge Curation: Use available resources to update knowledge in relevant fields and curate a personal collection of material.
Community Participation: Participate in research communities.
Technology Monitoring: Support monitoring of the external environment and assess emerging technologies to evaluate potential impacts, threats, and opportunities.
Knowledge Sharing: Contribute to reports, technology road mapping, and knowledge sharing.
Architecture Contribution: Contribute to the development of solution architectures in specific business, infrastructure, or functional areas and evaluate trade-offs in cost, performance, and scalability.
Technical Specifications: Produce specifications of cloud-based or on-premises components, tiers, and interfaces for translation into detailed designs.
Change Support: Support change programs or projects through the preparation of technical plans and application of design principles aligned with architecture standards, including security.
Scope Management: Define and manage scoping, requirements definition, and prioritization for small-scale changes and assist in complex initiatives.
Standards Compliance: Follow agreed standards and apply techniques to elicit and document detailed requirements.
Stakeholder Challenge: Provide constructive challenges to stakeholders.
Requirements Prioritization: Prioritize requirements and document traceability to the source.
Requirements Review: Review requirements for errors and omissions and provide input to the requirements baseline.

20. Solutions Architect Responsibilities

Change Control: Investigate and apply authorized changes to baseline requirements in line with change management policy.
Software Design: Undertake complete design of moderately complex software applications or components using agreed standards, patterns, and tools.
Component Design: Assist in the design of components for larger software systems and specify user or system interfaces.
Design Modelling: Create multiple design views to address stakeholder concerns and manage functional and non-functional requirements.
Design Evaluation: Assist in the evaluation of design options and trade-offs.
Peer Review: Collaborate in reviews of work.
Software Development: Design, code, verify, test, document, amend, and refactor moderately complex programs or scripts using agreed standards and tools.
Code Review: Collaborate in code reviews.
Data Engineering: Apply data analysis, design, modelling, and quality assurance techniques based on business processes to establish or maintain data structures and components.
Data Advisory: Advise database designers and application teams on data structures.
Database Expertise: Develop and maintain specialist knowledge of database and data warehouse concepts, principles, architectures, and software.
Data Assessment: Assess proposed changes to object or data structures and evaluate alternatives.
Database Implementation: Implement physical database designs to support transactional performance and availability needs.
Warehouse Design: Implement data warehouse designs that support business intelligence and analytics demands.
Build Definition: Define software modules for integration builds and produce build definitions.
Module Acceptance: Accept completed software modules and ensure they meet criteria.
Build Production: Produce software builds from source code for deployment on target hardware.
Environment Setup: Configure hardware and software environments.
Integration Testing: Produce integration test specifications, conduct tests, and report outcomes.
Fault Diagnosis: Diagnose faults and report test results.
Integration Reporting: Produce system integration reports.

Relevant Information

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