November 6, 2026 · 11 min read

Solutions Architect Job Description Template (Copy and Paste)

Companies usually open a solutions architect role when several systems, vendors and teams have to agree on how one business process works, and nobody owns that agreement yet. A useful posting for the role names that process, lists the systems involved and says which decisions the architect gets to make. A posting that asks for someone to “design scalable solutions” and holds six cloud certifications tells a strong candidate very little about whether the work suits them.

Consider a regional property and casualty insurer that wants policyholders to file a claim from their phone. The claim has to reach the policy administration system, a document vendor has to read photos of a repair estimate, adjusters need the file on a tablet, and payouts go through the bank interface the insurer already uses. Each of those pieces has an owner. The architect owns the design that connects them: which system holds the claim status, what happens when the document vendor is slow to respond, which parts to buy and which to build, and how the design gets through security review and the claims operations lead.

A posting written around decisions like those starts with the business process and the systems, and lets the technology requirements follow from them.

What Does a Solutions Architect Own?

A solutions architect owns the end-to-end design of a solution to a specific business problem, usually one that crosses existing systems, third-party products and more than one engineering team. The output is something people can build from and approve: the components, the integration contracts between them, the data each system is responsible for, the operating requirements and the trade-offs that were accepted along the way.

Five decisions sit at the core of the role, and naming them in the posting, in your own terms, tells a candidate far more than a list of duties.

Decision	What the architect is answering	Example from the claims project
Buy, build or extend	Whether a vendor product, a platform extension or custom code fits each step	Keeping the insurer’s current document vendor instead of building photo extraction in-house
System of record	Which system owns each piece of data and who may change it	Claim status lives in policy administration; the mobile app only holds a draft until submission
Integration contracts	How systems exchange data, what each message promises and what happens on failure	The vendor returns results asynchronously, so a claim needs a “documents pending” state
Operating requirements	Availability, security, data retention, audit trail and running cost	Estimate photos contain personal data, so they need a retention rule and access logging
Sequencing	What ships first and what waits	Launching auto glass claims before property claims with complex estimates

What the role usually does not own is the internal structure of each application. The engineers building the adjuster app decide how its code is organized, and the solutions architect decides what that app must send, receive and promise to the rest of the process. At a small company one senior engineer may do both jobs, which is fine, as long as the posting says which job you are hiring for.

Solutions Architect Job Description Template (Copy and Paste)

Replace every bracket before publishing. If a bracket is hard to fill, treat it as a sign that part of the role still needs a decision on your side.

Role and Working Arrangement

Title: Solutions Architect
Team: [Business unit or engineering group, and the person this role reports to]
Where and when: [Remote, hybrid or office-based, plus the time zones that need daily overlap]
Engagement: [Employee or contract, and the expected length if it is a contract]
Main partners: [Business owners, engineering leads, security or compliance, key vendors]

Role Summary

[Company] is hiring a solutions architect to design how [business process] works across [systems]. Today, [describe the current limitation and what it costs customers or staff]. You will own the design from the first requirements conversation through to the decisions our engineering teams build from, and you will stay involved until the solution runs in production and the team supporting it knows how it works.

Responsibilities

Work with [business owner] to turn [process] into requirements engineering teams can estimate, including the exceptions that happen in real operations.
Decide, with written reasoning, which parts of the solution use existing systems, which use vendor products and which need custom development.
Define the system of record for each data entity and the integration contracts between [system A], [system B] and [system C], including retry and failure behavior.
Set requirements for availability, security, retention and audit, and confirm them with [security or compliance owner].
Evaluate vendors against those requirements, covering their APIs, data handling and exit terms.
Write architecture decision records and diagrams that engineers, reviewers and business owners can each use.
Stay with the delivery teams during the build to answer design questions, revise the design when an assumption fails and review the riskiest integrations.
Hand over operating documentation: what each component does, who supports it and how to tell when an integration has stopped working.

Requirements

Experience designing a solution that connected several existing systems in production, and being accountable for how it behaved after launch.
Working knowledge of integration patterns (synchronous APIs, queues or event streams, scheduled file exchange) and of when each one fits.
Enough hands-on engineering in [languages or platforms you use] to review an integration and notice where the build has drifted from the design.
Experience with [cloud platform or hosting environment], including its identity, networking and managed services.
Data modeling, with an understanding of how ownership, consistency and retention shape a design.
Security fundamentals for [personal, payment, health or other regulated data], including access control and audit logging.
Clear writing for mixed audiences: a decision record an engineer trusts and a one-page summary a business owner can sign off.

Nice to Have

[Domain experience, for example insurance claims, freight or clinical systems]
[Named platforms such as your ERP, CRM or identity provider]
[A certification, only if a client contract or regulator requires it]
Experience with a migration where the old and new systems ran side by side for a period.

How Do You Adapt the Template for Your Company Stage?

The title stays the same across company sizes, but the job underneath it changes. Edit the summary and responsibilities to match the stage you are actually in.

Stage	What the architect is really doing	Edits to the template
Early startup with its first integrations	Designing and often building the integrations, close to a senior backend or full-stack engineer	Ask for hands-on delivery, drop the governance language and consider whether a senior engineer covers it
Growth company	Untangling integrations that were added one at a time and setting patterns other teams reuse	Stress shared integration contracts, vendor evaluation and work across two or three teams
Enterprise or public sector	Designing inside existing standards, review boards and procurement rules	Name the review bodies, approval steps and compliance frameworks, and weight stakeholder writing heavily

At an early startup, hiring an architect plus the engineers to implement the design is often more people than the problem needs. One senior engineer who can make the design calls and build the first integrations keeps ownership in one place and removes a handoff. If the person making those calls is also setting technical direction for the whole company, the CTO job description is closer to the role you need.

Delivery-Side vs. Pre-Sales Solutions Architect

The same title covers two different jobs, and a posting that mixes them tends to attract applicants for the wrong one. A delivery-side solutions architect works inside the company that will run the solution, as in the insurance example. A pre-sales solutions architect works at a software vendor and helps prospective customers see how the product fits their environment.

The pre-sales version runs discovery calls with a customer’s engineers, builds demonstrations and proofs of concept, answers security questionnaires and technical sections of requests for proposal, and passes accurate requirements to the vendor’s delivery team after the sale. It usually reports into sales engineering or customer success, and part of its success is measured by deals. If that is your role, rewrite the summary around the customers and products involved, replace the build-phase responsibilities with those activities and say how the role works with account executives.

Solutions Architect vs. Software Architect: Which Do You Need?

A solutions architect designs how several systems work together for a business process. A software architect shapes the internal structure of one product or codebase over time: its modules, data model, boundaries and conventions. An enterprise architect works a level above both, setting standards and a technology direction across the company’s portfolio of systems.

The problem tells you which posting to write. If a claims process crosses five systems owned by different groups and nobody can say which one holds the truth, write the solutions architect posting. If your own product’s codebase can no longer absorb new features without breaking something unrelated, you need a software architect, and the posting should describe the codebase rather than the business process.

What to Look for in Solutions Architect Candidates

Ask candidates to walk through a solution they designed that is still running. The stronger accounts include what they decided to buy rather than build and why, which integration failed after launch and how the design handled it, and who disagreed with the design and how the decision got made. A conversation shaped like a system design interview, but grounded in your own process, gives better evidence than a whiteboard exercise about a system nobody at your company runs.

Be careful with two easy signals. Fluent vendor vocabulary can sit alongside very little experience making trade-offs, and certifications show that someone studied a platform, not that they designed under real constraints. Interviews give you evidence about judgment, and how the person performs on the work decides it.

How Gun.io Approaches Solutions Architecture Work

At Gun.io, we start with the process that has to work and the systems it touches, then decide what kind of engineer the problem needs. Sometimes that is an architect who designs and stays close to delivery. For a smaller company it is often a senior engineer who can make the design calls and write the integration code too. Systems integration and architecture are areas we work in regularly, including a project that replaced a manufacturer’s fragile scripts around its ERP with a single .NET integration hub and a visual audit log, plus a native service connecting warehouse printers and the carrier API.

The engagement can run as staff augmentation, with the architect inside your team and taking direction from you, or as scoped project delivery, where we take on more of the delivery and engineering management. The architects and senior engineers we introduce are interviewed by people who test both their technical depth and how they work with a client team, and we keep judging fit by how they perform once the work starts. Contracts, payments and compliance are handled as part of the engagement, and the types of engineering work we take on go well beyond integration.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Should a Solutions Architect Job Description Include?

It should include the business process, the systems involved, the decisions the architect owns and the people who must approve the design. Add a plain statement of what success looks like, such as a claim reaching an adjuster without anyone retyping it, so candidates can judge whether their experience applies.

Does a Solutions Architect Need to Write Code?

Most effective solutions architects can read and review production code, even if they write little of it. At a startup they often write the early integration code themselves, while in a large organization they spend more time on design reviews, vendor work and approvals, so the posting should state which balance you expect.

Are AWS or Azure Certifications Required for a Solutions Architect?

Certifications are not required unless a client contract, partner program or regulator asks for them. They show a candidate has studied a platform, so treat them as a supporting signal and ask for a design the candidate delivered on that platform instead.

Who Should a Solutions Architect Report To?

A delivery-side solutions architect usually reports to the CTO, the VP of engineering or a head of architecture. Reporting only into a business unit can leave the architect without the authority to hold engineering teams to the design, while pre-sales architects normally report into sales engineering.

What Drives the Cost of a Solutions Architect?

Cost follows the complexity of the problem, the time the architect needs to stay involved and the experience the work demands. Regulated data, a large number of systems owned by different groups and a need to stay through implementation all push toward a more experienced architect and a longer engagement.

When Is It Too Early to Hire a Solutions Architect?

It is usually too early when you run one product with a handful of integrations that a single team owns. In that situation a senior backend or full-stack engineer can make the integration decisions and build them, and a dedicated architect becomes worth adding once several teams and vendors have to agree on one process.

Write the Posting Around the Process That Has to Work

A solutions architect posting works when it describes a real process, the systems it crosses and the decisions the architect will own, and when everything else in it follows from those. If you are designing a process that spans several systems, talk to us about what you’re connecting, who owns each system and which decision is stuck.