Hi, I have that title and role in my company, and it makes me cringe a little when I read some replies implying that architect work is "just producing diagrams and let developers do the real work". Best way for me to answer the questions asked is to explain the role of the architects in my company I guess. So, here are some of the things I'm expected to do (along with my fellow architects): - knowing everything about all the technologies we use and the ones we could use: languages, frameworks, protocols, front end, back-end, cloud platforms, tools, etc. (note that it is 'expected' from us, personally I feel far from having all the knowledge others think I have or should have... And my learning is done on my free time, obviously...) - having an equal knowledge about the business, for all the clients - knowing all the technicalities of every project we operate - dealing with the clients and partners for everything technical. Involves presentations, meetings, fake smiles, and often dying a little inside and refrain from facepalming - when starting a new project, designing for the big picture, taking into account performances, reliability, security and using knowledge of all the projects to decide what we can or not reuse - breaking down the design into chunks for developers. Each developer is given requirements to meet for her chunk, then must design her chunk herself, that we will then review, with maybe several iterations. - managing development processes (source control, build, etc) - managing developers' recruitment and growth. Architects are in charge of technical interviews, developers' initial training, performance assessment, task repartition, etc. - ensuring code quality - building teams you know you can trust enough to delegate as much as you can - being responsible. As an architect, you make the overall technical decisions, and you tacitely approve the decisions of every people to whom you delegated, meaning you're accountable for everything that can go bad - taking the heat when things break, even if not design-related. Identifying the causes. Converting the heat you've taken into proper advice for developers so that the errors will never be done again. That's a key point of the role: taking the stress, but avoid putting it back on the developers (there is already the project manager for that...) - being able to quickly fix anything on any project - coding some critical parts, some tools or some abstractions to facilitate developers' work - suffering from impostor syndrom and str