Hello and welcome back to the Careers in Cloud Computing course. I'm Adam Hawkins and I'm discussing the architect job position. I'll cover the role and responsibilities, technical skills, general salary range and relevant certifications or trainings. Architect is the most senior position in this course. They sit at the intersection of business and IT. They're expected to make expert high-level design decisions, set technical standards such as coding standards, what platforms to use. These decisions impact the entire organization, so leadership and collaboration qualities are a must. These decision require technical confidence across the entire spectrum.

Cloud Computing expertise is a must these days, as more organizations move into the Cloud. Architects must also know programming, database design, testing approaches, and how to leverage new technologies to meet new business requirements. They also must deeply understand the relationship between the software development process and business needs. These skills take years to develop, perhaps even a decade. So, expect these to be some of the best paying positions in the industry. Training for the soft skills is difficult and impossible to come by, though. AWS, GCP, and Azure offer certification for architect-level work, target the highest levels for architect-level work. Architect is really the last stop in the IT hierarchy. It's more than just telling or deciding what people should do.

It's rewarding to build high-quality business systems and create great engineering atmospheres. My decisions in the software architect context have been some of the hardest and technically most interesting ones in my career to date. They've also been the most rewarding because of how much positive change resulted for the business and the engineering staff. Now, I'm changing it up for this position. Architects need to ask questions and have answers for them. So, instead of providing with questions to ask about the position, I'm providing questions the architect needs to ask others. This should give you a feel for how different this position is from the others.

This wraps up a discussion on the specific positions. We'll wrap up the course with a short summary, recommendations and your next steps.