| Detail | For this role |
|---|---|
| Department | Information Technology |
| Level | Senior management |
| Reports to | Head of Engineering |
| Direct reports | Technical Lead |
| Experience | 10 to 14 years of software development, with at least 3 years owning the design of a production application |
Software Architect job description template
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Job title: Software Architect
Department: Information Technology
Reports to: Head of Engineering
Location: [City], [office, branch or site]
About the role
A Software Architect designs the internal structure of an application or product: how it splits into modules or services, how data flows between them and which patterns, frameworks and standards the code follows. They turn non-functional needs such as performance, security and maintainability into concrete design decisions and check that the build stays true to them. Product companies and IT services firms in India usually place the role under the head of engineering. A good Software Architect keeps the codebase easy to change as the product and the team grow.
Key responsibilities
- Gather non-functional requirements such as load, response time, security and availability from product owners and engineering leads.
- Define the application architecture: module or service boundaries, layering, data ownership, communication patterns and error handling.
- Choose frameworks, libraries and databases for the product, recording each choice and its trade-offs in an architecture decision record.
- Design the domain and data model with the team, including how data is versioned, migrated and archived.
- Specify API contracts and integration patterns, covering REST or gRPC conventions, events, versioning and retry rules.
- Review pull requests on critical modules to confirm the build follows the agreed design.
- Plan the gradual breakup of a monolith or the refactoring of legacy modules without stopping feature delivery.
- Set targets for performance, test coverage and static analysis, and review the results at every release.
- Explain the architecture to new team members through diagrams, walkthroughs and documentation that is kept current.
- Agree deployment, observability and secure coding standards for the application with the DevOps and security teams.
Requirements
- B.E., B.Tech or M.Tech in Computer Science, or MCA
- Architecture certifications from Oracle, Microsoft or AWS are an advantage
- 10 to 14 years of software development, with at least 3 years owning the design of a production application
KRAs and KPIs for a Software Architect
Key result areas for the appraisal form, each with a KPI you can measure every month or quarter.
| Key result area | How to measure it |
|---|---|
| Design quality | No major rework in a release caused by a design gap, checked at each release retrospective |
| Performance | Key transactions meet their agreed response time targets under the planned peak load |
| Maintainability | No new critical static analysis issues, with duplicated code under the agreed threshold at every release |
| Decision records | Every significant technical decision recorded as an ADR within one week of being made |
| Review turnaround | Design and critical code reviews completed within 2 working days |
| Team enablement | Architecture walkthrough given to every new engineer within their first month |
Skills and tools
Tools used day to day: IntelliJ IDEA or Visual Studio, Git, SonarQube, C4 or UML diagramming tools, Swagger and Postman, JMeter, Confluence.
Reporting line and career path
Next roles: Enterprise Architect, Principal Engineer, Head of Engineering
Interview questions for a Software Architect
- How would you split a monolithic order management system into services, and what would you leave unsplit?
- Tell me about an architecture decision record you wrote. Which alternatives did you reject?
- How do you handle a business transaction that spans three services?
- A developer ignores the agreed layering to meet a deadline. What do you do?
- How do you design an API so that older mobile app versions keep working?
- When is a modular monolith a better choice than microservices?
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What does a software architect do?
A software architect decides how an application is structured: its modules or services, data model, APIs, frameworks and coding standards. They turn needs such as speed, security and scale into design decisions, review critical code and keep the architecture documented. The goal is software that performs well today and is still easy to change years later.
What is the difference between a software architect and a solution architect?
A software architect works inside one application, on its code structure, patterns and technical quality. A solution architect works a level above, on how several systems, products and integrations come together to solve a business problem, often during presales or project planning. In IT services firms, solution architects hand designs to software or technical architects to detail.
How do I become a software architect?
Most software architects in India spend 8 to 10 years as developers and technical leads first. Build depth in one stack, learn system design, write design documents for the features you lead and review other people's code. Owning performance, security and scalability problems on your current project is the most direct route.