What does a Solutions Architect do?
A solutions architect designs how a specific customer problem gets solved with technology — reference architectures, integration boundaries, migration sequencing, and the non-functional requirements covering availability, latency, security and cost. In India the role spans services firms and product vendors, translating a business outcome into a design that delivery teams can build and operations can actually run.
A solutions architect usually has around 8–18 yrs of experience and earns typically ₹25L–₹65L/yr in India. The day-to-day blends Reference architecture, Cloud design (AWS/Azure/GCP), Integration patterns and more — this page gives you a ready-to-use solutions architect job description template you can copy, plus the exact skills and salary employers expect.
Solutions Architect job description template
Copy the 9 responsibilities, 6 requirements and 9 skills below into your job post, then edit the parts that are specific to your company — pay band, location and reporting line.
Select the text above to copy it manually if the button is unavailable.
What are a Solutions Architect's key responsibilities?
A solutions architect is typically responsible for the 9 duties below, which cover the day-to-day work most employers expect the role to own outright. Paste them into your job post as they are, or cut the ones another team already handles — a responsibility list that claims work the hire will not actually do is the fastest way to lose a candidate at offer stage:
- Run technical discovery with customer teams to surface constraints, integrations and legacy realities
- Produce reference architectures, sequence diagrams and decision records the delivery team can follow
- Specify non-functional requirements — availability targets, latency budgets, RPO/RTO, data residency
- Design migration paths from existing systems, including cutover, rollback and coexistence phases
- Run well-architected reviews across reliability, security, performance, cost and operability
- Compare build-versus-buy options and document the trade-offs behind the recommendation
- Size infrastructure and model total cost of ownership across the first few years
- Guide developers through implementation questions and review deviations from the agreed design
- Align the design with enterprise standards, compliance obligations and audit expectations
What qualifications does a Solutions Architect need?
Employers hiring a solutions architect in India usually ask for the 6 qualifications below, typically alongside 8–18 yrs of experience. Keep only the ones you will genuinely screen on: every extra must-have narrows the pool, and in the Indian market a long mandatory list filters out strong candidates whose background simply reads differently on paper:
- Deep hands-on engineering experience earned before moving into design work
- Fluency in at least one major cloud plus integration patterns, APIs and event-driven design
- Experience with security, identity, networking and data flow across system boundaries
- Ability to write and present a clear design document to engineers and business sponsors alike
- Track record of taking an architecture into production, not only proposing one
- Professional-level cloud certification, commonly expected in Indian services firms
What skills should a Solutions Architect have?
These are the 9 skills employers name most often on live solutions architect listings in India. Treat the first few as the ones worth screening for directly and the rest as signals a candidate can pick up on the job — asking for all of them at once is what turns a reasonable role into an unfillable one:
Listing the three or four skills you genuinely screen on — rather than all 9 — is what keeps a solutions architect posting from filtering out candidates who could do the job.
What does a Solutions Architect earn in India?
Typical salary (India)
typically ₹25L–₹65L/yr
Experience range
8–18 yrs
These are typical ranges and vary by city, company and skills. For live, role-specific pay data, see the OnJob salary guide.
Solutions Architect job description — FAQs
What is the difference between a solutions architect and an enterprise architect?
Enterprise architecture governs the whole technology landscape — standards, capability maps and multi-year roadmaps across many systems. Solution-level design is scoped to one problem or programme: choosing components, defining integrations, and specifying how this system meets its targets. One sets the rules of the estate; the other designs a building inside it.
What are non-functional requirements and why do they decide designs?
Non-functional requirements state how well a system must behave rather than what it does — availability, latency, throughput, recovery objectives, retention, residency and cost ceilings. They drive the expensive choices: whether to run multi-region, how data replicates, which consistency model applies. Projects that skip them discover the gaps during the first traffic peak or audit.
Does the role stay technical or turn into documentation?
Credibility depends on staying close to implementation. Architects who stop building lose the detail that makes a design realistic, and delivery teams quietly route around them. Healthy practice keeps a foot in prototypes, spikes and code review, while the rest of the time goes to discovery, decision records and unblocking the teams doing the work.
How do you move into architecture in India?
The common route runs through senior engineering or technical leadership — someone who has shipped and operated systems, then begins owning design decisions across teams. Cloud professional certifications open doors at services companies, but interviews test scenario design: given these constraints, sketch the architecture and defend every trade-off you accepted.