Solutions Architect: Pre-Sales vs. Delivery vs. Forward Deployed
The title 'Solutions Architect' covers very different jobs. At a cloud or software vendor (an AWS SA, for example) it is usually a pre-sales role: helping customers choose and design with the product, with sales targets attached. At a services company or large enterprise it is a delivery role: designing the system a team then builds. A Forward Deployed Engineer sits in between — embedded with a customer and writing real production code. Hiring one for the other is a common mistake.
How to tell them apart on a resume
Pre-sales Solutions Architect
Customer workshops, proofs of concept, RFP responses, 'influenced $X in revenue', works at AWS, Microsoft, Salesforce or a SaaS vendor.
Delivery / Enterprise Architect
Architecture documents, design reviews, technical decisions for projects, TOGAF, works at a services firm, bank or large enterprise.
Forward Deployed Engineer
Embedded on customer sites, wrote and shipped production code, data integrations, works at Palantir, an AI lab or an enterprise AI startup.
The question that settles it
“Was your success measured by deals closed, by systems your teams delivered, or by code you shipped for a customer?”
Read the full definitions
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