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Ask HN: Startup Jobs as a Solution Architect

5 points by stats111 ↗ HN
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?

13 comments

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swatcoder
Rather 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.

stats111
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.).
toast0
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.

swatcoder
Wow. It’s a relief to know that you only need 11 employees or a some customized installs for your company to be established. VC really is a racket, I guess.

In any case, I’ve seen that role as Sales Engineer at enterprise startups in the 50-100 employee range, but haven’t focused enough on that space to offer more specifics.

If nobody else replies constructively here, I’d start by looking for the appropriately sized enterprise startups on Crunchbase or LinkedIn and see what you can notice about their titles and org structure.

stats111
As you originally suggested, the closest may be the CTO role. Do startups generally hire CTO's? And are CTO's expected to code?
swatcoder
Startups rely on building an ensemble team that covers all the needed responsibilities with the minimum cost in staff. So the way those responsibilities get sliced depends on whose already involved.

If you're ready to explore smaller, earlier-stage teams, you can just pitch what you might contribute and see how well it fills a whole in the ensemble. Often, you'll be able to negotiate for a title that fits your own career trajectory, since titles are pretty much BS in that world.

Anecdotally:

I was once hired as CTO where the founding team consisted of high profile non-tech professionals who knew their industry and had connections to mine for sales/fundraising/partnership. And my own preference in that role is to not code as I find it hard to settle into the deep creative flow of my coding process amidst a lot of more piecemeal tasks and meetings.

I've also seen and passed on CTO opportunities where the founder was (say) a young MBA with some family wealth to seed the earliest days. That's often a more skeleton crew deal at that point, so the CTO may even be the only developer for a while.

orbz
I’ve mostly seen Solution Architect treated synonymously with Sales Engineer or Forward Deployed Engineer.
b20000
startups need people that do things rather than talk about it
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closeparen
The 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.
wizwit999
Solution architects are ways to extract money from dinosaurs, not useful at a startup.
SheddingPattern
I've seen architecture roles in startups that focus on legacy industries, like public sector or banking. Consider adjacent roles like engineering manager or technical program manager if you have delivery experience. Another opportunity is a senior position in a startup's professional services arm, similar to forward deployed engineer but may have titles like implementation engineer, customer success engineer eer, or solution architect.