Job description template

Solutions Architect

As a Solutions Architect, you will design and evolve reliable, secure system architectures that enable product teams to ship capabilities with confidence. You will translate business and technical requirements into pragmatic designs, set technical direction, and partner with engineering to ensure solutions perform, scale, and remain maintainable.

Responsibilities

Own end-to-end technical architecture for assigned solutions, from requirements and design through deployment and operational readiness
Design system components and integration patterns (APIs, messaging, data flows) with attention to latency, reliability, scalability, and cost
Create and maintain architecture documentation, including diagrams, service contracts, and design rationales
Collaborate with engineering and security stakeholders to define and implement secure-by-design controls
Establish engineering standards for observability, incident readiness, and effective troubleshooting
Review designs and proposals from peers to ensure alignment with architecture principles and target state
Drive continuous improvement by identifying architectural risks and recommending remediation plans

Must-have qualifications

Hands-on experience designing distributed systems and defining system architectures in production
Proficiency designing secure system architectures (authentication, authorization, secrets, threat modeling)
Strong experience with APIs and integration patterns (REST/GraphQL, event-driven or messaging systems)
Demonstrated ability to apply reliability and scalability principles (SLOs, failure modes, capacity planning)
Practical experience with cloud infrastructure and deployments (IaC, networking, managed services)
Experience with observability and operational readiness (logging, metrics, tracing, runbooks)

Nice to have

Experience migrating legacy systems or modernizing monoliths into services
Knowledge of data architecture (streaming/batch patterns, data governance, consistency models)
Experience with performance engineering (profiling, load testing, optimization tradeoffs)

What success looks like in 12 months

Deliver architecture designs that reach production with clear operational readiness
Improve reliability and reduce production incidents tied to design gaps
Strengthen security posture of implemented solutions
Increase observability coverage and reduce time-to-diagnose
Reduce architectural churn through better standards and design governance

Logistics

Full-time (40 hours a week), remote from Latin America.
Working hours overlap with US business hours.

About the company

[About your company: what you build, your stage and team size]

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Interview scorecard

Score every candidate against the same bar

Design and enable resilient, secure system solutions that help engineering teams deliver reliable product outcomes at scale.

Outcomes to measure

What this hire should deliver in the first year. Replace [N] with your own targets.

Deliver architecture designs that reach production with clear operational readiness. Measure: ship [N] approved solution architectures that meet agreed operational readiness criteria
Improve reliability and reduce production incidents tied to design gaps. Measure: reduce production incidents attributable to architectural/design issues by [X]% over 12 months
Strengthen security posture of implemented solutions. Measure: close [N] prioritized security gaps in architectures (e.g., authz/authn, secrets handling, threat-model findings) by agreed dates
Increase observability coverage and reduce time-to-diagnose. Measure: improve median time to diagnose incidents by [X]% and increase % of critical services with required dashboards/alerts to [Y]%
Reduce architectural churn through better standards and design governance. Measure: adopt [N] architecture standards/patterns (e.g., integration, reliability, security) and achieve [X]% reuse/adoption in new designs

Competencies and weights

What to evaluate, how much it counts and what a strong answer looks like.

Distributed systems architecture · 22%
Core responsibility is end-to-end architecture for distributed, production systems. Evaluated in Round 1.

Weak: Describes components without mapping them to failure modes, scaling behavior, or clear integration boundaries.
Meets the bar: Presents an architecture with defined interfaces, integration flow, and reasonable scaling and reliability tradeoffs.
Strong: Designs a coherent distributed solution with explicit failure-mode handling, clear boundaries, and measurable performance/reliability reasoning.

Secure-by-design thinking · 18%
Security architecture choices are required for solutions to be production-ready. Evaluated in Round 1.

Weak: Relies on generic security statements without addressing auth, authorization, secrets, or threat surfaces.
Meets the bar: Identifies key threat vectors and proposes concrete controls for authentication, authorization, and sensitive data handling.
Strong: Builds defense-in-depth with clear trust boundaries, least privilege, secure secrets practices, and threat-model-driven decisions.

API and integration design · 16%
Solutions must integrate reliably across services using appropriate patterns. Evaluated in Round 2.

Weak: Proposes integration without discussing contracts, versioning, idempotency, or event semantics.
Meets the bar: Defines API/event contracts with versioning and reasonable handling of retries, ordering, and failure cases.
Strong: Designs robust integration patterns with explicit contract evolution strategy, clear consistency assumptions, and resilient error handling.

Reliability and scalability · 16%
Architect must translate reliability goals into concrete design and operational approaches. Evaluated in Round 2.

Weak: Discusses reliability in broad terms without linking SLOs to design choices and operational strategies.
Meets the bar: Defines SLOs/SLIs and selects pragmatic approaches for retries, timeouts, backpressure, and capacity planning.
Strong: Models failure scenarios and designs for graceful degradation, bounded resource usage, and measurable scalability outcomes.

Cloud and infrastructure execution · 12%
Architect must be effective implementing and guiding deployment architecture in cloud environments. Evaluated in Round 3.

Weak: Cannot articulate infrastructure/networking/IaC considerations or managed-service tradeoffs.
Meets the bar: Selects appropriate cloud building blocks and explains networking/security/deployment considerations at a useful level.
Strong: Delivers clear, implementable infrastructure guidance with repeatable IaC approach and thoughtful service tradeoffs.

Observability and operability · 10%
Solutions must be measurable and diagnosable in production. Evaluated in Round 3.

Weak: Does not define what to measure or how to investigate issues across services.
Meets the bar: Proposes logging/metrics/tracing strategy with alerts and runbook inputs for common incidents.
Strong: Designs end-to-end observability with actionable dashboards/alerts, tracing correlation, and clear diagnostic runbooks.

Architecture communication · 6%
Mid-level architect must work independently and align stakeholders with crisp decisions. Evaluated in Round 1.

Weak: Communicates designs inconsistently or cannot explain tradeoffs and rationale.
Meets the bar: Explains design goals, tradeoffs, and assumptions clearly to engineering stakeholders.
Strong: Tailors communication for different audiences while keeping technical decisions and rationale unambiguous and documented.

Interview questions

Questions for every interview round

Each round has an owner, a time box and questions that test the competencies above.

Round 1: Architecture fundamentals and security
Senior Solutions Architect · 45 min

Walk through a distributed system architecture you designed for production: what were the key requirements, boundaries between services/components, and the main failure modes you planned for?
Describe a security architecture you implemented or led. How did you define trust boundaries, authentication/authorization approach, and how did you handle sensitive data and secrets?
Tell us about an architectural decision where tradeoffs were unclear. How did you communicate the rationale and assumptions, and what did you do to get alignment?

Round 2: Integration, reliability, and scaling
Staff Engineer (Backend/Platform) · 45 min

How do you design API and integration contracts to handle versioning and change over time? Include how you manage retries, idempotency, and error semantics.
Explain how you translate reliability goals (e.g., SLOs/SLIs) into concrete design choices (timeouts, backpressure, graceful degradation, capacity).
Give an example where you redesigned an integration or workflow to improve reliability or scalability. What was the issue and how did the new design address it?

Round 3: Cloud execution and operability
Engineering Manager (Infrastructure) · 45 min

Describe how you approach cloud infrastructure design and deployment for a new or evolving service. What do you consider for networking, managed services, and IaC?
Tell us about the observability strategy you implemented for a system you owned: what logs/metrics/traces did you set up, what alerts did you define, and how did you ensure incidents could be diagnosed quickly?

Red flags to watch for

Focuses on feature delivery but cannot explain how reliability, failure modes, and operational readiness are addressed in the architecture
Proposes security controls without articulating trust boundaries, authorization model, secrets handling, or threat-driven reasoning
Can describe an integration at a high level but cannot discuss idempotency, retries, versioning, and contract evolution
Shows limited familiarity with implementing cloud infrastructure decisions (networking/IaC/managed-service tradeoffs)
Does not connect observability to concrete diagnostic workflows (what to measure, why it matters, and how it shortens investigation)

How much does it cost to hire a Solutions Architect in Latin America?

In 2026, a senior Solutions Architect in Latin America costs $7,875 to $9,000 a month all-in, versus $16,625 in the US: up to 53% less. Mid-level starts at $5,125.

Country

Mid-level

Senior

Argentina

$5,125

$7,875

Brazil

$5,750

$8,625

Colombia

$5,125

$7,875

Mexico

$6,000

$9,000

United States

$13,875

$16,625

Monthly cost in USD, all-in: the talent's salary plus Teilur's flat 20% fee, from our 2026 rates. The United States row shows what the same role typically costs there.

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Frequently asked questions

What does a Solutions Architect do?

Typical responsibilities include: own end-to-end technical architecture for assigned solutions, from requirements and design through deployment and operational readiness; design system components and integration patterns (APIs, messaging, data flows) with attention to latency, reliability, scalability, and cost; create and maintain architecture documentation, including diagrams, service contracts, and design rationales. The full list is in the template above.

How much does it cost to hire a Solutions Architect in Latin America?

In 2026, a senior Solutions Architect in Latin America costs $7,875 to $9,000 a month all-in, versus $16,625 in the US: up to 53% less. Mid-level starts at $5,125.

Can I customize this Solutions Architect job description?

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Solutions Architect Job Description Template