Select your current position
Pick a role and level — we'll show the growth path, skills and gap analysis.
Development path
Junior
0-2 years
Responsibility: Completing tasks under the guidance of senior colleagues. Learning the codebase, standards, and team processes. Writing code to spec, fixing simple bugs, writing tests.
Key skills:
Middle
2-5 years
Responsibility: Independently developing features from decomposition to deployment. Participating in code review. Optimizing performance. Mentoring junior developers. Taking part in architecture discussions.
Key skills:
Senior
5-8 years
Responsibility: Designing solution architecture. Creating Architecture Decision Records. Build vs buy evaluation. Technical presales. Prototyping.
Key skills:
Lead / Staff
7-12 years
Responsibility: Domain architecture. Design standards. Coordinating architects. Working with stakeholders. Technology evaluation.
Key skills:
Principal
10+ years
Responsibility: Enterprise architecture. Technology development strategy. Cross-organizational influence. Vendor relationships. Industry advisory.
Key skills:
Gap analysis: skills to develop
To reach the next level you'll need to develop:
Designs E2E testing architecture: test environment management, data strategies, execution infrastructure. Defines testing boundaries.
Designs CI/CD with GitHub Actions: multi-stage pipelines, matrix builds, reusable workflows. Defines deployment strategies for architectural decisions.
Designs auth architecture: centralized IAM, OAuth2 flows, token management. Defines identity boundaries between services.
Creates structured prompts: templates for ADR generation, architecture review, trade-off analysis. Uses chain-of-thought for complex decisions.
Designs async architecture: event-driven systems, message broker selection (Kafka, RabbitMQ), saga patterns. Defines consistency models.
Designs documentation architecture: docs-as-code, API portal, versioned documentation. Defines documentation standards.
Designs indexing strategy: composite indexes, covering indexes, search indexes. Defines index requirements for access patterns.
Designs integration testing architecture: contract testing strategy, service virtualization, test data management. Defines integration points.
Designs concurrent systems: thread pools, async processing, lock-free patterns. Defines the concurrency model for architecture.
Designs data access: CQRS, read models, caching layers. Defines query optimization strategy for architecture.
Designs secure systems: defense-in-depth, secrets management architecture, secure communication. Defines security boundaries.
Designs type-safe systems: API schema contracts, code generation, cross-service type safety. Defines typing strategy.
Career transitions
Possible career trajectories for the Solutions Architect role
🔙 Comes from 2
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