Lakshya

Platform & Developer Experience

Commercial track ≈230 postings · largest

1 · 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

Solutions ArchitectPartner Solutions Architect Delivery Solutions ArchitectSpecialist Solutions Architect Deployment StrategistSolutions Engineer Field EngineerStaff SA — Banking

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

Recruiter screen — 30 min
Hiring manager — 1 hour Background, motivation, product knowledge, and examples of deals — wins and losses. Have a loss story ready and be honest about it.
Technical screen — 1 hour Storage layers, pipelines, productionising data systems, cloud architecture, and working with customers.
Coding assignment Real, and frequently underestimated. Dataframe operations in Python or Scala at Databricks.
Panel — 2 to 3 hours
Customer presentation — the decisive round One hour role-playing the SA: ask discovery questions to understand a customer's need, then pitch the platform's value and the right architecture. Candidates fail by pitching before discovering.

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

United States — base$150k – $240k Frequently plus 20–40% variable. Always clarify the base-to-variable split before comparing offers.
India — total₹30L – ₹65L Estimated. India SA roles at these vendors sit near the top of local platform bands.

What this role tests

Themes, and where to learn them

These chapters are shared across every role that tests them, so preparation here compounds rather than being spent once.

Discovery before solutionThe decisive round in three separate archetypes, with the lowest pass rate of any stage.READ THE CHAPTER →The controlOne habit separates strong candidates from plausible ones more reliably than any technical depth.READ THE CHAPTER →

Practice questions across all themes →  ·  Back to Platform & Developer Experience →