What Does an Enterprise Architect Do?
Enterprise architects are professionals who design and maintain a large organization’s IT infrastructure and information systems. An enterprise architect creates and implements the overall technology strategy and vision of the business, aligning it with business objectives, and ensuring its efficiency, effectiveness, and security. They work in myriad industries, including health care, construction, finance, and technology.
To design and implement the organization’s technology infrastructure, the enterprise architect collaborates with other key stakeholders within the organization, including executives, department heads, and IT teams. As part of this process, it may also be necessary to assess existing systems, identify opportunities for improvement, and work with vendors and other external partners to identify new technology solutions that can enhance the organization’s capabilities.
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National Average Salary
Enterprise architect salaries vary by experience, industry, organization size, and geography. Click below to explore salaries by local market.
The average national salary for an Enterprise Architect is:
$153,461
Enterprise Architect Job Descriptions
It’s important to include the right content in your job description when hiring an enterprise architect. The following examples can serve as templates for attracting the best available talent for your team.
Example 1
Do you love solving high-level problems? Are you great at tackling highly technical, complex problems? If so, you might be the perfect fit for our position as an enterprise architect! Enterprise architects use their deep technical understanding to develop, suggest, and implement company-wide systems. They take the needs and goals of a company and make sure that the systems being used are able to meet and exceed these ends. These architects have an enormous degree of responsibility and autonomy and seek to provide software solutions that meet and exceed expectations and look to reduce inefficiency and cost whenever possible. If this sounds like you, don’t hesitate to apply.
Typical duties and responsibilities
- Design and build computer networks including local and wide area networks and intranets
- Research and implement network software
- Supervise network administrators and network engineers, especially during the network set-up and configuration process
- Collaborate with colleagues and executives to meet business objectives and to establish a strategy
- Evaluate network performance
- Research new technologies to strengthen the organization
Education and experience
This position requires a bachelor’s degree in computer science, information technology, or a related field.
Required skills and qualifications
- Proficient in finding creative solutions to complex problems
- Excellent verbal and written communication skills
- Ability to collaborate with and supervise others
- Experience with various technology methodologies and architecture applications
- Solid leadership and organization skills
- Detail-oriented and analytical thinker
Preferred qualifications
- Expertise in one cloud platform, such as Azure, AWS, or GCP
- Strong knowledge of architecture and integration patterns
- Excellent understanding of cloud-native, microservices, and event-driven architectures
- 3+ years of experience
Example 2
The Enterprise Architect is responsible for defining enterprise-wide architecture, planning for and directing large-scale integration efforts, and setting technology environment standards and guidelines. This position plays an integral role in building a holistic view and roadmap.
Responsibilities
- Partner with business and technology groups to ensure proposed technical solutions align with the company’s overall objectives
- Ensure business and technology groups enable and drive each other to meet the needs of the company’s mission and vision
- Collaborate with IT professionals, engineers, and leaders to document current state architecture, develop domain capability models, heatmaps, maturity assessments, health assessments, and technical roadmaps
- Contribute to the development, management, and enhancement of business capability models to drive enablement of the longer-term roadmap
- Provide input to the scope definition of strategic initiatives leveraging roadmaps, capability heatmaps, etc. to give visibility to impacts, dependencies, overlaps, and improvement opportunities
- Contribute to the architecture review process by creating validation checklists, reviewing architectural artifacts, and providing domain specific guidance to drive architectural alignment across the enterprise
- Define, communicate, and document the architecture patterns, standards, and technologies
- Analyze enterprise business context (e.g., trends and business strategy) and change requirements in other architecture viewpoints to derive the solution architecture ‘future’ state
- Apply architectural and engineering concepts to design solutions that meet operational requirements, such as scalability, maintainability, security, reliability, extensibility, flexibility, availability, and manageability
- Research, enforce, and drive the adoption of design patterns throughout the enterprise and deliver best practices for solution design and development
- Foster and maintain good relationships with colleagues to meet expected customer service levels
- Other duties and responsibilities may be assigned on a temporary or permanent basis as needed
Education and experience
- Bachelor’s degree in Management Information Systems, Computer Science, Engineering, Telecommunications, or a related field required
- Master’s degree in Management Information Systems, Computer Science, or a related field preferred
- TOGAF certification preferred
- At least 5 years of experience in an IT architectural or technical leadership capacity required
- At least 3 years of experience leading design and architecture of technology solutions preferred
- At least 10 years of experience working in a complex IT environment preferred
Knowledge, skills, and abilities
- Rapidly acquires new knowledge and skills perpetually, ability to “think big”
- Ability to understand the long-term and short-term perspectives of situations
- Ability to estimate the financial impact of individual solution architecture alternatives (scenario planning)
- Ability to define multiple solution options to business problems
- Ability to quickly comprehend the functions and capabilities of new technologies
- Knowledge of all aspects of enterprise architecture, planning, and goal setting at high and detailed levels
- Ability to implement technical strategy and design solutions to meet that strategy
- Ability to solve problems independently, quickly, and completely and to communicate them clearly to IT management and staff
- Ability to challenge conventional wisdom regarding technology refresh and hype
- Strong leadership and negotiation skills with business and technical groups
- Excellent verbal and written communication skills
- Strong project management and organization skills
- Demonstrated ability to build consensus among many stakeholders
- Ability to be comfortable with ambiguity and willing to take principled bets on new technology
- Ability to establish, implement, and enforce appropriate IT standards to meet business requirements
- Established skills in system design
- Must be able to take initiative and work without direct supervision
- Must be able to work in a team environment
- Must be able to work early mornings, nights, and weekends as required
Example 3
We need solid technology acumen combined with the ability to design, formulate, and effectively articulate our technology strategy and vision. Good social and communication skills are essential, no wallflowers needed. However, you do need to have tactfulness and ability to influence collaboratively without creating unnecessary friction. It’s a challenging role, but you’ll have the authority and organizational backing to help us mature our practice and our technology ecosystem.
Responsibilities
- Participate in and help lead strategic vision of the enterprise through the integration of IT architecture solutions, complex design patterns, technical strategy, and roadmaps
- Develops company architecture plans and reviews cost and feasibility of system requests while ensuring the planning aligns with the strategic needs of the company
- Collaborate to develop complex solutions that support our business model
- Create and present technical information in order to influence and gain the understanding of business as well as technical roles across the organization
- Lead Solution Architects to provide effective consulting on complex projects including fit for purpose and technical evaluations
- Update and maintenance of the key Enterprise Architecture deliverables.
- Architectural leadership in the resolutions of inter-program and inter-project issues.
Qualifications
- A Bachelor’s degree or equivalent work experience
- 15+ years experience preferably working across multiple IT disciplines with a background in software development, database management and/or design and some experience as a solution architect. Also need a conceptual or fundamental understanding of:
- eCommerce
- Data and Analytics
- General security principles
- Networking technologies/Infrastructure/Cloud
- ITAM, ITIL, Lean
- Web/Cloud
- Architecture Patterns and Design
- Ideally a background in Cloud technologies, particularly Google Cloud is desirable
Example 4
The Enterprise Architect manages medium to large solution development efforts, generating and guiding solution enabling architectures that support business and Technology strategy.
Responsibilities
- Perform all responsibilities in accordance with BECU Competencies, compliance, regulatory and Information Protection requirements
- Develop and maintain a comprehensive technical blueprint of the team’s services, creating solution options that align Technology services with business sponsor’s missions, goals and objectives with consideration of both technical and non-technical implications and trade-offs
- Develop and maintain the technology roadmap for assigned area, collaborating with business and Technology partners to ensure that the roadmap creates business value with technically sound solutions and seeking out opportunities to apply technical innovations to customer needs
- Maintain architecture standards, processes, and constraints across the organization
- Provides guidance and technical expertise to solutions teams across multiple disciplines and projects. Effectively articulate the value of architecture and technology
- Produce blueprints that guide the development and implementation of business solutions across a small set of projects, providing direction to technical teams during project delivery and ensuring implementations support technology and business roadmaps
- Collaborate with production support efforts to resolve near-term architectural issues and to remove architectural design debt
- Provide technology specific financial and technological analysis to Technology and Business leadership across teams to break down barriers and foster an understanding of enterprise services and architecture standards
- Review and recommend selection of third-party software platforms as needed
- Monitor the industry technology landscape to track the development of available solutions and identify opportunities for adapting the team’s solution architecture. Monitor business capability landscape to identify opportunities for greater long-term business value
- Perform additional duties as assigned
Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in Information Security, Computer Science or related field, or equivalent work experience required. Advanced degree preferred
- Minimum of 5 years of experience designing and implementing technology architectures required, including experience managing delivery of complex technology solutions
- Certification in LEAN, Agile/Scrum, or ITIL principals with experience implementing one of these practices preferred.
- Broad knowledge of technologies and supplier capabilities and experience implementing these into new and existing large infrastructure/systems required
- Experience working within large organizations, and the ability to develop strong relationships throughout the organization required
- Knowledge of modern technology service architectural hosting, security, and risk management concerns such as IAM, access control, monitoring, IaaS/PaaS/SaaS, and containers required
- Knowledge of the Microsoft infrastructure and solution stacks operating in on-premise, cloud, and hybrid hosting environments preferred
- Ability to communicate very technically challenging concepts to a broad audience required
- Excellent organizational, problem-solving, and negotiation skills required
- Strong facilitation and presentation skills preferred
- Proficient verbal and written skills required to effectively communicate and provide customer service required
- Full time hours required, with additional hours as necessary
Candidate Certifications to Look For
- CISSP Information Systems Security Architecture Professional. After obtaining the standard CISSP certification, candidates may add a concentration in architecture for added effect. They’ll develop a deeper understanding of architectural principles, including security, risk assessment, compliance, modeling, and governance.
- Dell EMC Proven Professional Cloud Architect Certification. Although there is a long list of certifications to choose from, this course will focus on developing cloud services within an ITaaS environment. Additionally, candidates will get to practice within a collaborative environment. This certification will provide them with practical and applicable skills and show their commitment to working in systems architecture.
- EC Council Certified Network Defense Architect. This certification is aimed at candidates seeking certification within a government or military agency. Specifically, this certification has a heavy focus on security and compliance and requires them to obtain the CEH (Certified Ethical Hacker) certification before obtaining this one. This certification will give employers confidence that candidates have what it takes to prevent unwanted intrusions and penetrations into systems they’ve implemented.
- Google Professional Cloud Architect. This certification will provide candidates with the foundational knowledge to design and implement cloud solutions. They’ll develop skills in security, compliance, management, analysis, and optimization of cloud architecture. There are no prerequisites for this exam, and it’s an excellent first step in learning and demonstrating valuable technical knowledge in the field.