Principal Solutions Architect

A Day in the Life:

The principal solutions architect proactively and holistically leads and supports architecture activities that guide the development and management of a portfolio of solutions. Solutions include projects, systems (including applications, technologies, processes and information), shared infrastructure services and shared application services. 

They understand the concepts of business goals, objectives and business outcomes, business capabilities, value-streams, and business processes and their importance in solution architecture. The solutions architect provides the necessary leadership, analysis and design tasks related to support the development of technology solutions to ensure that solutions meet business needs and align with architectural governance and standards. They create deliverables for managing the organization's portfolio of "to be" and "as is" solutions — including systems (applications, processes, information and technology), shared infrastructure services, and shared application services and components to enable and drive targeted business outcomes.

The focus of the Solution Architect is on which applications to modify or build and how they integrate with each other.  They will outline the overall integration patterns as well as define the integration specifications.

What you will do:

• Translates business and technical requirements into an architectural blueprint to achieve business objectives and documents all solution architecture design and analysis work
• Works closely with the product owners and product managers to ensure a robust architectural runway that can support future business requirements throughout the product lifecycle
• Understands business drivers and business capabilities (future and current state) and determines corresponding enterprise solution designs and change requirements to drive the organization's targeted business outcomes
• Monitors the current-state solution portfolio to identify deficiencies through aging of the technologies used by the application, or misalignment with business requirements
• Supports product managers in end of life product decisions to maintain, refresh or retire services, or systems, including applications, technologies, processes, and information
• Understands emerging technology trends and disruptions and their practical application to enable new and evolving business and operating models
• Analyzes the technology industry, competitors, and market trends, and determines their potential implications for a given solution
• Analyzes the business-IT environment to detect critical deficiencies, legacy, and technical debt, and recommends solutions for improvement
• Facilitates the evaluation and selection of software product standards and services, as well as the design of standard and custom software configurations
• Consults with application and infrastructure development projects and products to fit systems or infrastructure to architecture and identify when it is necessary to modify designs to accommodate the solutions architecture
• Leads evaluation, design and analysis for the implementation of a solutions architecture across a group of specific business applications or technologies based on enterprise business strategy, business capabilities, value-streams, business requirements and enterprise standards
• Manages and develops the architecture for a broader scope of projects or products, working closely with application architects that manage and design architecture for a single project or product or initiative
• Develops a roadmap for the evolution of a business capability from current to future state, as defined by the solutions architecture
• Acts as a consultant on a broad range of technologies, platforms, and vendor offerings to drive targeted business outcomes
• Creates architectural designs to guide and contextualize solution development across products, services, projects, and systems, including applications, technologies, processes, and information
• Works closely with the program management office (PMO) or project management office to ensure the execution of plans corresponds with what is being promised throughout the project or product lifecycle
• Provides consulting support to application architects within agile teams to ensure the project or product is aligned with the overall enterprise architecture
• Provides deliverables like standard definitions, reference models and architecture designs to support architectural governance to assess the impact of new and ongoing technology investment on the business and IT estate
• Supports a community of practice (CoP), guiding and helping agile teams, product owners to align with the overall enterprise architecture governance and assurance
• Designs and directs the