Solution Architect (With Business Analysis Expertise)

Job description / Role

Role purpose

We need a solution architect who can turn business requirements into solution designs and defend those designs in front of development, infrastructure, and integration teams. The role owns the technical direction of the solution. It is not a documentation role. You will be expected to question vendor and internal proposals, find weaknesses before delivery starts, and say plainly when a design does not meet the requirement, security standard, or budget.

Key responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end solution design across application, data, integration, security, and infrastructure layers.
• Produce architecture documents, data flow diagrams, sequence diagrams, and integration and API specifications.
• Select architecture patterns and justify the choices, including trade-offs, cost, and risk.

Technical challenge and design assurance

• Review designs from developers, vendors, and infrastructure teams, and challenge them on feasibility, scalability, performance, security, and supportability.
• Review integration approaches (REST, event-driven, batch, and file-based) and test them against failure scenarios, volumes, and dependencies.
• Validate sizing, environment, and hosting assumptions (development, system integration testing, user acceptance testing, and production; cloud and on-premises) with the infrastructure teams.
• Identify technical debt, bottlenecks, and single points of failure in existing systems and recommend fixes.
• Check that delivered work matches the approved design and raise deviations early.

Business analysis

• Elicit and document business, functional, non-functional, and technical requirements (BRD, FRD, TRD, and user stories).
• Trace every requirement to a design element and a test case.
• Run workshops with business owners and translate their needs into clear technical deliverables.
• Support impact assessments on scope, effort, and timeline when requirements change.

Stakeholder and vendor coordination

• Act as the technical point of contact between business owners, delivery teams, and third-party vendors.
• Review vendor proposals and technical responses against signed scope and requirements.
• Advise project and delivery managers on technical risks, dependencies, and decisions that need escalation.

Requirements

• Eight or more years in enterprise IT, with at least four years as a solution architect, technical architect, or equivalent.
• Hands-on delivery of API-led and system integration projects in enterprise or government environments.
• Practical background in business analysis, including requirements engineering and stakeholder management.

Technical skills

• API design: REST, OpenAPI/Swagger, JSON/XML, webhooks, and event-driven patterns.
• Integration platforms and API gateways, plus authentication and authorization (OAuth2, SSO, UAE PASS, or similar).
• Cloud and infrastructure fundamentals: networking, environments, availability, disaster recovery, and security architecture.
• Relational databases, SQL, and data mapping.
• UML, BPMN 2.0, and sequence diagrams, using tools such as Visio, Lucidchart, or Enterprise Architect.
• Agile delivery in Jira or Azure DevOps.

Certifications

• Mandatory: TOGAF Foundation.
• Mandatory (one of): AWS Solutions Architect (Associate or above) or Azure AZ-305.
• Preferred: CBAP or PMI-PBA.

Languages

• Arabic: Native or fluent, for business and stakeholder communication.
• English: Fluent, for business and technical communication.