Solution Architect

A Solutions Architect gets pulled into the room when a business decision (“we're migrating off our data center,” “we need to modernize this legacy system,” “we want to add agentic AI to this product”) needs to become a real, defensible technical plan — one that survives contact with security review, cost constraints, and the team that actually has to build it. AWS's Solutions Architect – Migration/Modernization postings describe exactly that arc: current-state assessment, a target architecture with explicit tradeoffs, and a migration plan that doesn't just describe the destination but the path there.

What separates this from a purely technical role is the audience split. You're writing architecture decision records (ADRs) and trade studies that other architects and engineers need to trust, and in the same week presenting the cost and risk implications of those same decisions to people who don't care about the technical details — only whether it works, what it costs, and what could go wrong. Losing either audience is a real failure mode: too abstract and engineering ignores you, too hand-wavy and leadership won't fund it.

The other current shift, reflected in this path's ADR/trade-study emphasis: architecture decisions increasingly need to account for where agentic AI fits, not as a bolt-on, but as a first-class part of the target state — which changes assumptions about data access patterns, integration points, and what “done” looks like for a modernization effort.