What Do Technical Architects Do?

As high level software development careers go, technical architecture might not be the most glamorous. It’s certainly not the most talked about, which is a shame because it’s both a fascinating and well paying role.

In this guide, we’ll be breaking down the typical technical architect job description. We’ll be covering the qualifications and experience you’ll need as well as realistic earnings expectations and how to map out your career roadmap.

What Is a Technical Architect?

If you want to understand the role of a technical architect then you’ll need to know a bit about the software development lifecycle.

It’s not uncommon for there to be a disconnect between the goals of a business as defined by its shareholders and the technical reality faced by engineering teams. In this regard, the technical architect is something of a diplomat, bridging the two and communicating between them.

These are the people responsible for high-level design choices and technical standards. While a software engineer is concerned with how a specific function is implemented within a single codebase, a technical architect is concerned with the integrity, scalability, and security of the entire ecosystem.

They’re the ones who define how various services communicate and which technologies should be used to support the business strategy. They’re also the people tasked with long term planning. Their systems are built to last for years at a time.

Role & Responsibilities

Glance at a few technical architect job descriptions and you’re likely to come across a lot of jargon that makes the title sound like a cross between project management and software engineering. In practice, it has a lot more to do with practical problem solving.

Technical architects generally work on the broad system design, which means creating the architecture of complex applications and ensuring that databases, APIs, and front-end services interact efficiently and securely.

Architects are also responsible for technology selection, which requires choosing the right languages, frameworks, cloud providers, and databases to solve a business problem without adding unnecessary complexity.

Of course, there will always be a political side to any senior development role. In this case, it’s mostly about getting technical and non-technical people to see eye-to-eye on what can happen and what needs to happen. This is why it’s good to develop strong communication skills. You’ll need to be good at making complicated subjects feel digestible.

It’s also common to take on other senior responsibilities like mentorship for less experienced developers as well as internal communication within the team. After all, it’s not just about keeping the shareholders and the c-suite on board. Everyone needs to be aligned with the overall vision or problems will inevitably creep in.

Lastly, there’s a lot of risk mitigation. Good design isn’t about jerry-rigging solutions. Good design is about planning ahead.

Technical architects spend a lot of their time identifying bottlenecks, investigating security vulnerabilities, or examining scaling issues before they disrupt production. 

How to Become a Technical Architect

In case it wasn’t clear by now, this is very much a senior role. You don’t start out as a technical architect, you work your way here by gaining a lot of experience at every level of production.

To step into this role, you need a strong background in software engineering. Most successful architects spend a decade or more as software engineers, gaining deep experience across multiple areas of the stack so they know exactly how a large codebase will behave under pressure.

It’s really important to understand that software engineering is the kind of job where you learn as much from a mistake as a success. So many ideas sound brilliant in theory but in practice are deeply problematic for reasons you might not have been able to predict. This is why technical architects need that experience.

You need to know what bad architecture looks like. You need to know the practical end result of poor decision making. Even more than that, you need different examples to compare.

Remember that no codebase is perfect. Whenever you start a new project, there’s always the urge to compensate for the failings of the previous one. That’s a natural part of the learning process as you find a balance of approaches that work and don’t work.

A decade of software engineering is a long time to try out different approaches and the end result is always a more educated, more thoughtful designer. That’s the person companies want to lead their teams.

Technical Architect Salaries

Before we wrap up, a quick note on salaries. As a senior role, technical architect salaries start out in the six figure range – usually at around $130,000. That said, it’s not uncommon to earn over $200K, especially in tech-hubs with high living expenses. Many technical architects also choose to further supplement their earnings via equity and stock options.