Solutions Architect / Technical Architect
Decides how the pieces fit — the systems, the integrations, the boundaries — and writes it down so a team can build to it.
Who to hire
The shape of person who does this job well — and whether you should be hiring it at all yet.
A seat in two situations: integration-heavy enterprise work, where the hard part is fitting into someone else’s estate, and agency or contract delivery, where the architect scopes and prices the build before anyone writes code. In a small product company the CTO is the architect and should stay so.
Education
Engineering background and breadth. An architect who has only ever worked in one stack will design that stack for every problem.
Experience
10+ years building, with at least two architectures still running that they did not personally maintain. Ask what they got wrong, and how they found out.
Vertical / domain experience
Enterprise integration domain is decisive — ERP, banking cores, health interfaces and telecom all have their own patterns and their own pain.
What it pays, roughly
$95,992 median, Canada — for Computer and information systems professionals, the closest occupation Statistics Canada actually measures, measured from $85,010 to $103,002 over 202,605 people. That occupation is broader than this role, so read it as an anchor, not a salary band — and note that a startup usually pays below it in cash and above it in equity.
Credentials and certifications
What exists, who issues it, and whether it means anything for this seat. A credential is evidence of a floor, never of judgment — and in a few of these roles it is a legal requirement rather than a nice-to-have.
| Credential | Issued by | When it matters | Skiploma |
|---|---|---|---|
| A note on the word “engineer” in Canada | Engineers Canada and the twelve provincial and territorial regulators | In a joint statement of July 2022 the regulators restated that “software engineer”, “computer engineer” and related IT titles prefixed with engineer may not be used by anyone not licensed as an engineer — in job titles, postings, résumés, websites or social media. APEGA obtained a court injunction against unlicensed use in 2019 and later pursued a software company over its postings. Alberta tabled Bill 7 in November 2023 proposing an exemption for the title; whether it is in force is not established here, so check your own province before writing it on a posting. This is why Canadian job ads so often say Developer. | — |
| Cloud architect certifications | AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure | The most concrete credential here, and genuinely expected on enterprise and public-sector bids. | — |
| TOGAF | The Open Group | Enterprise architecture framework. Common in large organisations; of limited use in a startup. | Study |
What this role does at each stage
The same title means three different jobs depending on how much money is in the bank. Read the stage you are at, then read the next one — that is what you are hiring toward.
The founder, by choosing boring technology and moving on.
The CTO. A separate architect at this stage produces diagrams nobody builds.
A seat in enterprise or agency work; in product companies, usually a staff engineer instead of a title.
Can one person hold this and something else?
The whole point of the many-hats problem: which of these jobs merge safely into one person, and which merges quietly cost you money or control.
Merges well with
- Chief Technology Officer (Founders & fractional leadership)
- Backend Engineer / Back-End Developer
- DevOps Engineer / DevOps Specialist
- Technical Project Manager / Delivery Manager
Architect and CTO are the same person below about twenty engineers. Architect and lead engineer is the healthier merge in a product company.
Keep separate from
No conflict, but an architect with no delivery accountability will over-design. Keep them on the hook for something shipping.
Reading a candidate
What good looks like in an hour, and what should stop the process.
Good signals
- Asks about constraints and budget before technology
- Writes a document a team can actually build from
- Chooses the dull option when it fits
Red flags
- Diagrams with no trade-offs stated
- Has not written code in a decade
- Every answer is the same platform
The same role in three kinds of company
This job changes shape depending on who is paying for it. An agency sells the hours, a contract shop delivers into someone else's estate, and a product company is building something it keeps — and the same title means something different in each.
In an agency
The agency architect prices the build. A low estimate wins the work and loses the margin, so this role decides whether the firm is profitable.
On a client contract
On contract, the architecture document is a contractual artefact — it defines what was agreed, and it is what a dispute is argued from.
In a product company
In a product company, beware the architect who does not build. Architecture that nobody implements becomes fiction within a quarter.
What this role runs on
The software categories this job lives in. Each links to our buying brief and to the research behind it.
| Category | Who the default is | What leaving costs | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Project Management Software | Microsoft, Atlassian, Asana, Monday | The weakest in this research | The research → |
| ERP — Enterprise Resource Planning | SAP | Implementation sunk cost | The research → |
| Workflow Automation — BPA, iPaaS & RPA | Microsoft Power Automate across the board; by segment, UiPath (RPA), ServiceNow (enterprise workflow), Workato / Boomi / MuleSoft (iPaaS) and Zapier… | Hundreds of live automations wired into production systems, each with its own credentials, connectors and edge-case logic | The research → |