Solutions Architect

Introduction

The Solutions Architect acts as the technical linchpin between business vision and engineering execution. You will translate strategic objectives and product needs into secure, scalable, and cost‑effective software architectures, while remaining hands‑on with code and cloud infrastructure.

In addition to collaborating with business analysts for detailed documentation, you will work directly with business stakeholders to deeply understand their requirements, co-create solutions, and ensure that technology platforms and capabilities are correctly positioned to address business needs. This direct engagement helps prevent requirements from being lost in translation and empowers you to propose innovative solutions based on available and emerging technologies.

You are expected to “live and breathe” business requirements, moving beyond order-taking to active solutioning. The role combines deep full‑stack engineering expertise with end‑to‑end solution design, governance, technical leadership, and mentorship across multiple product domains.

Duties & Responsibilities

Architecture & Design

• Engage with business, product, and engineering teams to understand requirements.
• Work directly with business stakeholders to elicit, clarify, and validate requirements, ensuring a shared understanding and co-creation of solutions.
• Collaborate with business analysts, who remain responsible for documenting requirements in detail, to ensure alignment and completeness.
• Produce high‑level designs (HLDs), detailed architecture diagrams, and API contracts.
• Define microservice boundaries, integration patterns (real‑time, message‑ and file‑based), and data flows.
• Select cloud services, frameworks, and platforms; evaluate cost, performance, and maintainability trade‑offs.
• Establish and enforce architecture standards, security‑by‑design principles, and best practices.

Cloud & DevOps

• Design and implement resilient, observable, auto‑scaling solutions on AWS (EKS, CloudFront, S3, RDS/Aurora, DocumentDB, OpenSearch, CloudWatch, IAM, Secrets Manager, CodePipeline/CodeBuild, ECR).
• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines with Jenkins and Argo CD; leverage Docker and Kubernetes for container orchestration.
• Apply Infrastructure‑as‑Code (Terraform) where appropriate.

Software Engineering

• Lead development of complex Angular front‑end applications with responsive UX.
• Design, build, deploy, and run Spring Boot Java microservices (REST & SOAP) and Node.js services (nice‑to‑have).
• Integrate LLM‑powered capabilities for both on‑prem and cloud inference.
• Write clean, testable code; implement unit/integration tests (JUnit) and code quality gates.

Data & Integration

• Model data effectively and optimize queries across Oracle/PLSQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, DynamoDB.
• Design schemas, stored procedures, and ETL flows; ensure data integrity and performance.
• Implement event‑driven and message‑based integrations with existing line‑of‑business systems.

Security & Compliance

• Embed IAM, encryption, threat modeling, and compliance requirements (PCI, POPIA, GDPR, etc.) into designs.
• Drive HA, DR, and backup strategies for mission‑critical workloads.

Leadership, Mentorship & Governance

• Present architectures, trade‑offs, and risks to senior leadership and stakeholders.
• Provide mentorship, coaching, and technical guidance to junior software engineers, fostering their growth and development.
• Lead regular knowledge sharing sessions, code reviews, and training workshops to build team capability and ensure best practices are adopted.
• Mentor engineers, conduct design reviews, and influence technical direction across development teams.
• Champion modernization initiatives and adoption of emerging technologies.

Collaboration & Solutioning

• Partner directly with business stakeholders throughout the solution lifecycle, from requirements gathering to solution validation and iteration.
• Proactively propose alternative or improved ways of solving business problems, leveraging both existing and emerging technologies—even those not yet deployed within the business.
• Champion a mindset of “living and breathing” business requirements, moving beyond order-taking to active solutioning.

3. Technical Competencies

Area

Depth

Cloud

AWS expert (Architect / DevOps certifications preferred).

Containers & Orchestration

Docker, Kubernetes (EKS), Helm; autoscaling & service mesh concepts.

Backend

Java 17+/Spring Boot (mandatory); Node.js (advantageous); REST & SOAP service design.

Frontend

Angular 15+, TypeScript, RxJS, component libraries (Material, AntD), HTML5, SCSS.

Data

Oracle (advanced PL/SQL), PostgreSQL, MongoDB/DocumentDB, DynamoDB; data modelling, query optimisation.

DevOps & IaC

Jenkins, Argo CD, CodePipeline/CodeBuild, Git, Terraform.

Observability

CloudWatch, OpenSearch, Prometheus/Grafana, distributed tracing.

Security

IAM, KMS, Secrets Manager, OWASP, threat modelling, secure coding practices.

Desired Experience & Qualification

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
• 8+ years of full‑stack software engineering experience, with at least 3+ years in an architecture or technical‑lead capacity.
• Proven track record designing and delivering large‑scale, highly available systems (AWS deployments preferred).
• AWS Solution Architect Professional or equivalent certification (preferred).
• Demonstrated success mentoring engineers and driving cross‑team technical initiatives.

Package & Remuneration

Negotiable