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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Website Architect

💰 $120,000 - $180,000

TechnologyWebArchitectureEngineeringProduct

🎯 Role Definition

As a Website Architect you will define, design, and own the technical blueprint for public-facing websites and web applications. You will blend deep technical expertise in web platform architecture, cloud and edge services, performance optimization, SEO and accessibility with pragmatic delivery experience. You will partner with product, UX, engineering, security and operations to create scalable, resilient, secure and search-optimized web experiences that meet business goals, increase conversion, and reduce technical debt.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Senior Front-End Engineer with architecture responsibilities
  • Senior Back-End Engineer or Full-Stack Engineer with cloud experience
  • Technical Lead or Web Platform Engineer

Advancement To:

  • Head of Web Engineering / Director of Web Platforms
  • Principal or Chief Architect (Enterprise Web / Cloud)
  • VP of Engineering (Web & Mobile)

Lateral Moves:

  • Solutions Architect (Cloud / SaaS-focused)
  • Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) / Platform Engineering Lead

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Design and document holistic website architecture blueprints that balance performance, scalability, security and cost for high-traffic public websites and digital platforms, including component diagrams, deployment topology, data flow, and integration points.
  • Lead architecture decisions for frontend frameworks, build systems, server-side rendering, hydration strategies, and progressive web app (PWA) implementations to deliver fast, accessible, and SEO-friendly user experiences.
  • Define backend architecture patterns (microservices, serverless, monolith decomposition) and API strategies (REST, GraphQL) to ensure reliable, versionable, and evolvable integrations between web clients and services.
  • Architect high-availability and disaster recovery strategies for web properties, including multi-region deployments, failover mechanisms, health checks, and automated recovery processes in cloud environments (AWS, GCP, Azure).
  • Specify CDN strategies, edge computing patterns, caching layers (edge, browser, server-side), cache invalidation policies, and content delivery optimization to minimize latency for global audiences.
  • Collaborate with DevOps/Platform teams to design CI/CD pipelines, release orchestration, blue/green or canary deployment patterns, infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation) and automated rollback criteria for website releases.
  • Establish web performance budgets, monitoring, and observability plans (RUM, synthetic tests, Lighthouse, Web Vitals) and lead cross-functional programs to improve LCP, FID/INP, CLS, and other user-centric performance metrics.
  • Define security architecture for web applications including authentication and authorization models (OAuth2, OIDC, SSO), secure session management, input validation, CSP, XSS/CSRF mitigations, and integration with security scanning tools.
  • Lead SEO architecture and technical SEO best practices: structured data/schema.org, canonicalization, hreflang, indexability, sitemap generation, robots.txt strategies, and server-side rendering to maximize search discoverability and organic traffic.
  • Drive accessibility architecture decisions and governance (WCAG 2.1/2.2 compliance) ensuring semantic HTML, focus management, keyboard navigation, ARIA patterns and automated/manual testing are part of the delivery lifecycle.
  • Define content management and headless CMS integration patterns (e.g., Contentful, Sanity, Strapi) and advise on content modeling, localization, preview environments and editorial workflows to support content-driven websites.
  • Create guidance and standards for frontend build optimization including code-splitting, tree shaking, image optimization (responsive images, AVIF/WebP, lazy loading), font strategies, and critical CSS to reduce time-to-interactive.
  • Architect observability and logging for web platforms including centralized logging, distributed tracing for web requests, performance event correlation, error budgets and actionable alerting to support site reliability.
  • Evaluate and select third-party services and vendor integrations (payment gateways, analytics, personalization engines) and provide integration architectures that minimize privacy/security risk and performance impact.
  • Lead prototyping and POC efforts to validate architectural choices (edge computing, serverless, micro-frontends, streaming SSR) and translate learnings into architecture decision records and implementation roadmaps.
  • Define API contracts, versioning strategy, and backward compatibility rules for web-facing APIs and partner with backend teams to ensure predictable, performant API surfaces for web clients.
  • Partner with product and UX to translate business requirements into technical epics and architecture-driven sprint plans, ensuring trade-offs are documented and technical debt is tracked and managed.
  • Mentor engineering teams on architecture patterns, code quality, automated testing strategies, and non-functional requirements to raise the baseline of engineering excellence across web teams.
  • Conduct architecture reviews, perform codebase audits and security/performance reviews, and create remediation plans with prioritized technical actions and estimated effort.
  • Define data flow and privacy architecture for user tracking, analytics (GA4), personalization, and consent mechanisms to ensure compliance with privacy regulations (GDPR, CCPA) and minimize data leakage.
  • Produce clear architecture documentation, runbooks, and onboarding materials for engineering, product, and operations teams; maintain architecture decision records (ADRs) to capture trade-offs and historical context.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc architecture review requests and provide consultative guidance to feature teams implementing web changes.
  • Collaborate with QA, SRE and security teams on incident retrospectives and permanent fixes for production outages affecting web availability or performance.
  • Contribute to the organization's web platform roadmap, identify opportunities for modernization (e.g., migration to edge rendering), and quantify expected improvements in performance, scalability, and cost.
  • Partner with analytics and marketing teams to ensure tagging strategy, analytics accuracy, and SEO tracking are aligned with architecture and do not degrade site performance.
  • Represent the technical voice of the web platform in vendor RFPs, technical vendor evaluations, and executive-level roadmap discussions.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Web architecture design for high-traffic websites and web applications, with demonstrable experience producing architecture diagrams and ADRs.
  • Frontend technologies: modern JavaScript/TypeScript, React/Next.js, Vue/Nuxt, or equivalent frameworks and SSR/SSG experience.
  • Backend and API design: Node.js, Python, Java, or Go; experience building and documenting RESTful APIs and GraphQL schemas.
  • Cloud platforms and services: AWS (Lambda, CloudFront, S3, ECS/EKS), GCP, or Azure; experience with multi-region deployments and cost optimization.
  • CDN and edge computing: CloudFront, Fastly, Cloudflare Workers, or Akamai with strategies for caching, routing and edge logic.
  • Performance optimization: Lighthouse, Web Vitals, image and asset optimization, critical rendering path, and performance budgets.
  • Security for web apps: OAuth2/OIDC, CSP, secure cookie/session management, vulnerability mitigation (XSS, CSRF) and familiarity with application security scanning tools.
  • Infrastructure-as-code and CI/CD: Terraform, CloudFormation, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or GitLab CI for repeatable, automated deployments.
  • Headless CMS and content delivery: Contentful, Sanity, Drupal Headless, or custom CMS integrations with preview and localization patterns.
  • SEO technical implementation: server-side rendering, indexability, hreflang, canonicalization, structured data/schema markup and sitemap strategies.
  • Accessibility implementation and testing: WCAG 2.x knowledge, axe-core, automated and manual accessibility testing approaches.
  • Observability and monitoring: APM (Datadog, New Relic), RUM tools, centralized logging, tracing (OpenTelemetry), and alerting strategies.
  • Data privacy and compliance: experience designing consent frameworks, cookie management and minimizing PII exposure in analytics.

Soft Skills

  • Strategic thinker who can translate business goals into technical roadmaps and measurable architecture outcomes.
  • Clear communicator able to present complex architecture concepts to engineering and non-engineering stakeholders, including executives.
  • Collaborative leader and mentor who can influence cross-functional teams without direct authority.
  • Strong problem-solver and decision-maker comfortable with trade-offs, ambiguity and prioritizing technical debt against feature delivery.
  • Customer-obsessed mindset focused on UX, accessibility, SEO, and measurable user experience metrics.
  • Project planning and stakeholder management skills to drive architecture initiatives to completion.
  • Continuous learning orientation to adopt and evangelize modern web patterns (edge, serverless, micro-frontends).

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or related technical discipline (or equivalent professional experience).

Preferred Education:

  • Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or MBA for combined technical and product leadership backgrounds.
  • Relevant certifications (e.g., AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect, Certified ScrumMaster) are a plus.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Software Engineering
  • Information Technology / Systems
  • Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) or UX (preferred for UX/Performance focus)
  • Cloud Computing / Distributed Systems
  • Information Security (beneficial)

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 5–12 years of progressive experience in web development and architecture, with at least 3–5 years in a lead or architect role designing production web platforms.

Preferred: 8+ years of experience with demonstrable ownership of web architecture for high-traffic consumer or enterprise websites, proven results in improving performance/SEO/availability, and experience leading cross-functional architecture initiatives.

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