An AWS Solutions Architect designs secure, resilient and cost-effective solutions on Amazon Web Services, translating business needs into cloud architecture.
Role overview
AWS Solutions Architects design across compute, networking, storage, identity and security, balancing performance, resilience and cost. Deep networking and security fundamentals underpin every good design.
Typical responsibilities
- Design AWS architectures for resilience, security and cost.
- Choose and integrate the right services for each requirement.
- Define networking, identity and data strategies.
- Advise teams and document architecture decisions.
Required technical skills
- Networking (VPC, subnetting, routing, DNS)
- Cloud security & IAM
- Compute, storage & databases
- High availability & disaster recovery
- Cost optimisation
Required soft skills
- Translating business needs to architecture
- Trade-off analysis
- Stakeholder communication
- Documentation & diagramming
- Continuous learning
Recommended learning paths (vendor-neutral)
Understand a core concept
High Availability & Redundancy
Keeping services running through failure: load balancing and failover.
Tap or hover a part to learn more.
No single point of failure.
High availability starts by removing single points of failure — duplicate servers, links, power and paths so no one component can take the whole service down.
Check your understanding
1. What does a load balancer do?
2. Roughly how much downtime does 99.9% allow per year?
Concepts to master — your readiness map
Work through these interactive Academy guides, marking each complete to build your Job Readiness Score for this role:
Recommended certifications
- CompTIA Network+
- CompTIA Security+
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate — on the Academy roadmap
Technical interview preparation
- How would you design a highly available web application on AWS?
- Explain a VPC and how subnets and routing work.
- How do you approach cost optimisation in the cloud?
Behavioural interview preparation
- Describe presenting an architecture to stakeholders.
- Tell me about a design trade-off you had to justify.
Career progression
Associate → Professional Solutions Architect, specialising in security, networking or data — a senior, well-paid cloud track.
Typical UK salary
Typically £50,000–£70,000 in the UK, rising to £80,000–£110,000+ at professional/lead level.
Prepare with Missiora
- AI Interview™ — run a scored mock interview for this exact role.
- Career Coach™ — get a personalised path from where you are to this role.
- Career Passport™ — evidence your skills and earn shareable achievements as your readiness grows.