I've worked as a Solution Architect for several years and have been considering roles at startups, but startups don't seem to hire Solution Architects? Is there another term for this position in startups, or do senior developers typically take on design responsibilities?
Ask HN: Startup Jobs as a Solution Architect
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Re: Ask HN: Startup Jobs as a Solution Architect
#2Try: https://topstartups.io/jobs/?role=solution+architect
https://angel.co/jobs should pull up some too
Re: Ask HN: Startup Jobs as a Solution Architect
#3Rather than speculating how titles translate across work cultures, can you elaborate on what your own responsibilities and strengths have been as a Solution Architect in these recent roles?
That should enable people here to share what titles have fulfilled those responsibilities in their orgs.
Edited to add: I will mention that many early/small startups expect their CTO to take responsibility for most significant technical direction and architecture, and lesser but still non-trivial architectural responsibility gets handed down to daily grind developers. It can take some growth before there's room for an intermediate role that focuses specifically on architecture.
Re: Ask HN: Startup Jobs as a Solution Architect
#4I’ve mostly seen Solution Architect treated synonymously with Sales Engineer or Forward Deployed Engineer.
Re: Ask HN: Startup Jobs as a Solution Architect
#5startups need people that do things rather than talk about it
Re: Ask HN: Startup Jobs as a Solution Architect
#6[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Startup Jobs as a Solution Architect
#7The words "solution" and "architect" both have enterprise and old-economy connotations; you will probably not see them too often in startup world. Small and early stage startups don't really separate architecture from implementation in terms of personnel and responsibilities. Later in life the people with more architecture and less implementation responsibility could be Staff Engineers, Sr. Staff Engineers, Principal Engineers, etc.
Re: Ask HN: Startup Jobs as a Solution Architect
#8Solution architects are ways to extract money from dinosaurs, not useful at a startup.
Re: Ask HN: Startup Jobs as a Solution Architect
#9Rather than speculating how titles translate across work cultures, can you elaborate on what your own responsibilities and strengths have been as a Solution Architect in these recent roles? That should enable people here to share what titles have fulfilled those responsibilities in their orgs. Edited to add: I will mention that many early/small startups expect their CTO to take responsibility for most significant tec…
I work in management consulting and design and assure complex IT systems for large public sector organisations, acting as an intermediary between business stakeholders and technical teams. The work requires strong communication skills, stakeholder management, commercial awareness, and technical skills. Solution architects typically have a background in software development and have extensive experience working in a variety of industries and technical domains. It's massively unfair to suggest that Solution architects just "talk about" things as suggested by another commenter. In the public sector especially, problems are big and unwieldy (think legacy systems, poor interoperability, multiple stakeholders, regulatory requirements, multitude of use cases, technical governance etc.).
Re: Ask HN: Startup Jobs as a Solution Architect
#10Rather than speculating how titles translate across work cultures, can you elaborate on what your own responsibilities and strengths have been as a Solution Architect in these recent roles? That should enable people here to share what titles have fulfilled those responsibilities in their orgs. Edited to add: I will mention that many early/small startups expect their CTO to take responsibility for most significant tec…
I work in management consulting and design and assure complex IT systems for large public sector organisations, acting as an intermediary between business stakeholders and technical teams. The work requires strong communication skills, stakeholder management, commercial awareness, and technical skills. Solution architects typically have a background in software development and have extensive experience working in a v…
Imagine a company with say ten people. Five do customer service. One writes the Android app, one writes the iOS App. Two of the others are technical cofounders and wrote and maintain the servers, as well as design the products. What do you see yourself doing with those skills as the tenth person?
If a startup needs those skills, it's not really a startup anymore.