Job Title: Lead Solutions Architect
Job Summary: The Lead Solutions Architect is responsible for driving the design and delivery of technology solutions that support business growth, operational efficiency, and digital transformation initiatives. This senior technical leadership role translates business needs into practical, scalable software and platform solutions while guiding engineering teams through implementation.
The role combines strong software architecture skills, broad technology experience, and the practical use of modern tools, including AI, where they create measurable business value. This is not a full-time coding role; however, the Lead Solutions Architect must have enough hands-on technical depth to validate approaches, build proof of concepts, review designs, and help teams solve complex problems.
Job Duties & Responsibilities
Solution Architecture & Technical Leadership
- Partner with business leaders to understand objectives, operational challenges, and opportunities for improvement.
- Translate business requirements into practical technical solutions, architecture options, and implementation roadmaps.
- Define application, data, integration, infrastructure, and security architecture for strategic initiatives.
- Establish architecture standards, reusable development patterns, and engineering best practices.
- Lead solution design reviews and provide technical oversight across multiple projects.
- Balance speed, cost, scalability, maintainability, security, and business value in architecture decisions.
Application Development Leadership
- Guide development teams through architecture, design, implementation, testing, and production readiness activities.
- Participate in code reviews, design reviews, and technical planning sessions.
- Build proof of concepts and reference implementations when needed to validate direction or reduce delivery risk.
- Help teams resolve complex technical challenges across applications, integrations, data flows, and platforms.
- Promote modern software engineering practices, automation, DevOps, observability, and secure development methods.
Business & Technology Alignment
- Serve as a trusted advisor to business and technology leadership.
- Evaluate new project ideas and recommend practical approaches based on business value, complexity, risk, and delivery capacity.
- Develop technology roadmaps that align with organizational goals and operational priorities.
- Support project prioritization, estimation, sequencing, and technical planning.
- Communicate architecture decisions clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.
Innovation & AI-Enabled Value
- Evaluate emerging technologies, including AI, automation, analytics, and cloud services, with a practical business-value lens.
- Identify opportunities where AI can improve workflows, decision support, user productivity, data quality, or operational efficiency.
- Help establish pragmatic guardrails for AI usage, data access, security, and responsible implementation.
Required Qualifications
- 12+ years of software engineering, application architecture, solution architecture, or enterprise technology experience.
- Proven success leading complex application development or modernization initiatives.
- Experience designing cloud-based, hybrid, and enterprise-integrated solutions.
- Strong background in application architecture, systems integration, API design, data architecture, and secure software development.
- Experience leading technical teams, mentoring developers, and influencing technical direction.
- Demonstrated ability to translate business objectives into executable technology solutions.
- Strong understanding of software architecture and design patterns, application modernization, platform design, enterprise integrations, APIs, and event-driven architecture.
- Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS and/or Azure.
- Experience with data platforms, reporting, analytics, operational data flows, DevOps, CI/CD, automation, and Infrastructure as Code.
- Development experience with Python, .NET, Java, TypeScript, or similar platforms.
- Knowledge of security, identity, governance, and production support considerations.
- Strong executive presence, communication skills, consulting mindset, and practical problem-solving ability.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience using AI-enabled applications, automation, analytics, or productivity tooling where appropriate to create business value.
- Experience presenting architecture options to senior leadership and explaining business impact.
- Ability to whiteboard practical solutions with business stakeholders and technical teams.
- History of mentoring senior engineers, developers, and architects.
- Ability to evaluate tradeoffs, make pragmatic recommendations, and lead through influence across business, technology, and delivery teams.
- Strong balance of strategic thinking, delivery accountability, and hands-on technical credibility.
