Platform & Developer Experience
Solutions Architect / Delivery Architect
The biggest title in the family and the one platform engineers most often dismiss without reading.
What the job actually is
You are the technical authority on a vendor's platform, in the room with a customer. Pre-sales architects build proofs of concept and establish credibility with executives alongside an account executive; post-sales architects own the implementation after the contract is signed. It is a genuinely technical job — Databricks sets a coding assignment — but the deliverable is a customer's decision, not merged code.
Ask which side you are being hired for in the first call. Pre-sales and post-sales are different jobs with different rhythms, different compensation structures and different exits, and the JD frequently does not say.
Titles this hides behind
Very often split by vertical — financial services, public sector, healthcare, retail — or by partner (AWS, Azure). Both splits are a hint to lead with the domain you already know.
Who is hiring it
Databricks by a wide margin, plus Confluent, MongoDB, Elastic, ClickHouse, Snowflake, Grafana Labs, New Relic, JFrog. India is a real market here — Bengaluru postings for Solutions Architect, Partner SA and Delivery SA appear across the corpus, several India-specific.
The loop
Prepare like this
- Rehearse discovery before solution. The presentation round is scored substantially on the questions you ask in the first ten minutes. Write down fifteen discovery questions and practise choosing six.
- Know the product's competitive position honestly — where it wins, where it genuinely loses, and what you would say to a customer who raises the loss.
- Build one real POC on the vendor's platform and be able to demo it. Nothing else establishes technical credibility as quickly.
- Have a deal you lost and the specific technical reason. "We lost on price" is a weak answer; "we lost because their existing Kafka footprint made migration cost exceed the three-year saving" is a strong one.
- Do not skip the coding assignment prep. It is the most common place strong customer-facing candidates get cut.
Be ready for
- "A customer wants to migrate off a competitor. Walk me through your first meeting." Discovery, current-state mapping, and honesty about what will be hard.
- "The customer's architecture is wrong and they are proud of it. What do you say?" Testing whether you can disagree without losing the room.
- "How do you know a POC succeeded?" Success criteria agreed in writing, before the POC starts.
Red flags in the posting
Quota with no engineering. If compensation is heavily variable and the JD never mentions building anything, this is sales engineering with an architect title. Legitimate work, but a different career.
Vertical with no vertical support. Being the "healthcare SA" with no domain enablement means learning HIPAA on live calls.
Compensation
A day that is actually representative
| Time | What you are actually doing |
|---|---|
| 09:00 | Discovery call. Fifteen questions prepared, six asked, no demo. |
| 11:00 | Build a POC on the platform, against their actual data shape. |
| 13:30 | Competitive conversation where you name honestly where we lose. |
| 15:00 | The coding assignment nobody expects to be real, and is. |
| 16:30 | Debrief with the account executive on what would actually unblock the deal. |
Real cases worth being able to discuss
The vendor's own interview preparation material sets out the loop explicitly — hiring manager, technical screen, coding assignment, panel, and a customer presentation.
Use it to say: “I prepared against their published process, which told me the presentation carries the most weight.”
A three-week plan
Week 1 — the POC
Days 1–5: Build something real on the vendor's platform and be able to demo it end to end.
Week 2 — the conversation
Days 1–3: Write fifteen discovery questions; practise choosing six.
Days 4–5: Prepare an honest competitive position, including where you lose.
Week 3 — rehearse
Days 1–3: The presentation round: discovery first, pitch second, on a timer.
Days 4–5: The lost-deal story and the coding assignment.
The book for this field
Infrastructure & Reliability
Reliability and error budgets, capacity arithmetic, networks, storage and the restore you have not tested, the physical layer, a debugging method that transfers, running production, and an honest look at Kubernetes. Plus a Middleware section — web and application servers, messaging (IBM MQ, Kafka) and managed file transfer, from basics to licensing and cost.
Also read for this role
Cloud Platform Engineering
Seven chapters comparing the three major clouds where they genuinely differ: the compute spectrum and the ceilings that decide it, managed Kubernetes and the address exhaustion nobody plans for, identity models that do not transfer, networking and the internal traffic that outcosts your egress, storage and database traps, committed-use and spot mechanics, and an honest read on frameworks, market share and certifications.
Cross-cutting
Skills every archetype tests
These are shared across every field on this site — the same question asked in different vocabulary — so preparation here compounds rather than being spent once. The book above is specific to your field.
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