Top 12 Solution Architect Skills to Put on Your Resume

In the rapidly evolving tech industry, a Solution Architect bridges gnarly business problems and practical technology. A strong resume should surface the skills that prove you can design, guide, and land strategic solutions—reliably, securely, and without wasting a dollar.

Solution Architect Skills

1. AWS
2. Azure
3. Kubernetes
4. Docker
5. Microservices
6. DevOps
7. CI/CD
8. Terraform
9. Ansible
10. RESTful APIs
11. Agile
12. Salesforce

1. AWS

AWS is a broad cloud platform spanning IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS. For architects, it’s a toolbox for building scalable, secure, and resilient systems that grow with the business, not against it.

Why It's Important

AWS offers global scale, serious reliability, and deep security controls. You can design flexible architectures, move fast with managed services, and keep costs visible.

How to Improve AWS Skills

1. Design to the AWS Well-Architected Framework: Apply all six pillars—Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, Cost Optimization, and Sustainability.
2. Get a handle on cost: Savings Plans, Reserved Instances, Spot, AWS Budgets, Cost Explorer, and Compute Optimizer. Tagging and chargeback keep spend accountable.
3. Security first: Least privilege with IAM, short-lived credentials, IAM Identity Center, KMS for encryption, CloudTrail and Security Hub for visibility, GuardDuty for threat detection.
4. Performance and scale: CloudFront for edge delivery, ElastiCache for caching, Graviton-based instances, autoscaling everywhere, and managed databases tuned to the workload.
5. Reliability: Multi-AZ by default, multi-Region where it matters, Route 53 health checks and failover, AWS Backup and lifecycle policies.
6. Automate infrastructure: CloudFormation or CDK for native stacks; Terraform/OpenTofu when you need multi-cloud parity.
7. Governance: AWS Organizations, Control Tower, Service Control Policies, and a landing zone that makes good decisions the easy path.
8. Observability: CloudWatch metrics/logs, X-Ray tracing, and proactive alarms. Bake SLOs into dashboards.

Iterate. Measure. Tighten the screws where it counts.

How to Display AWS Skills on Your Resume

2. Azure

Microsoft’s cloud platform spans compute, data, networking, and AI, with strong enterprise integrations. You get global scale, governance guardrails, and a mature identity story.

Why It's Important

Azure enables secure, scalable architectures that slot neatly into Microsoft-centric environments while staying open to modern patterns.

How to Improve Azure Skills

1. Best practices: Follow the Azure Well-Architected Framework and reference architectures; adopt Azure Landing Zones from day one.
2. Policy and governance: Azure Policy, Blueprints, and management groups to enforce standards and compliance at scale.
3. Security: Microsoft Defender for Cloud for posture and threat detection, Key Vault for secrets, Private Link for private access, and Conditional Access with Entra ID.
4. Cost control: Azure Cost Management, Reservations, Savings Plans, and tagging for showback/chargeback.
5. IaC and automation: Bicep or ARM templates, Terraform/OpenTofu, and Azure DevOps/GitHub Actions pipelines.
6. Operational excellence: Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, Application Insights, and action groups tied to SLOs.
7. Resilience: Availability Zones, paired regions, Traffic Manager/Front Door, and robust backup/restore plans.

Treat governance and security as product features, not paperwork.

How to Display Azure Skills on Your Resume

3. Kubernetes

The control plane for containers. It schedules, scales, and heals workloads so teams can ship fast without drowning in server minutiae.

Why It's Important

Kubernetes standardizes deployment and operations across environments. It powers microservices, hybrid setups, and modern delivery practices.

How to Improve Kubernetes Skills

1. Run managed when possible: EKS, AKS, or GKE reduce operational toil. Use Cluster Autoscaler, HPA, and VPA for elastic capacity.
2. Right-size resources: Requests/limits, quality of service classes, and node pools per workload type. Keep bin packing efficient.
3. Security hardening: RBAC least privilege, NetworkPolicies, Pod Security Admission (PSA), image scanning with Trivy, and signed images via Sigstore cosign.
4. Traffic and APIs: Gateway API is the future; keep Ingress simple. Service mesh (Istio or Linkerd) for mTLS, retries, and policy where needed.
5. Observability: Prometheus and Grafana for metrics, OpenTelemetry for traces, and Fluent Bit for logs. Correlate with trace IDs end to end.
6. Release strategy: GitOps with Argo CD or Flux, plus canary/blue-green rollouts. Keep rollbacks instant.
7. Cost awareness: Track request waste, right-size nodes, and prefer Spot/Preemptible where safe. Namespaces scoped with quotas.
8. Hygiene: Keep clusters updated, test upgrades in nonprod, and prune dangling resources religiously.

Small, sharp manifests beat sprawling YAML jungles.

How to Display Kubernetes Skills on Your Resume

4. Docker

Package apps and their dependencies into portable containers. Build once, run anywhere—consistently.

Why It's Important

Containers simplify deployments, enable microservices, and make environments predictable. Less “works on my machine,” more throughput.

How to Improve Docker Skills

1. Smaller, safer images: Multi-stage builds, distroless or slim bases, and regular vulnerability scanning.
2. Build performance: Docker BuildKit, layer caching, and target-based builds to speed CI.
3. Security posture: Drop root with user namespaces, read-only filesystems, minimal capabilities, SBOMs, and signature verification.
4. Networking: Keep networks simple; tighten ingress/egress rules. Encrypt where necessary.
5. Data durability: Named volumes and clear backup strategies for stateful data.
6. Compose for dev: Compose v2 for local stacks; keep dev close to prod with consistent env parity.
7. Policy: Enforce base images, tag pinning, and scan gates in CI before promotion.

Lean images start faster and reduce your blast radius.

How to Display Docker Skills on Your Resume

5. Microservices

A system split into independently deployable services aligned to business capabilities. More agility, more isolation, more moving parts.

Why It's Important

Decoupled services scale independently, fail gracefully, and let teams ship changes without tripping over each other.

How to Improve Microservices Skills

1. API first: Define interfaces with OpenAPI, stick to consistent contracts, and version thoughtfully.
2. DDD alignment: Let bounded contexts shape service boundaries. Avoid entity sharing and chatty calls.
3. Data ownership: Database-per-service with asynchronous integration patterns where feasible. Embrace eventual consistency.
4. Resilience: Circuit breakers, timeouts, retries with jitter, bulkheads. Prefer Resilience4j and sidecar policies via service mesh.
5. Observability baked in: Structured logs, metrics, and distributed tracing. Golden signals at the edge and per service.
6. Security: OAuth2/OIDC at the edge, mTLS service-to-service, and strong secrets hygiene.
7. Delivery: CI/CD per service, ephemeral test environments, and automated contract testing.
8. Governance: Lightweight standards (logging, auth, error models) with paved roads rather than hard gates.
9. Cost and sprawl: Consolidate when services become too fine-grained. Keep platforms opinionated.

Monoliths aren’t bad—fuzzy boundaries are. Start modular, split when it hurts.

How to Display Microservices Skills on Your Resume

6. DevOps

A way of working that blends dev and ops, leans on automation, and treats flow as a first-class goal. The outcome: faster delivery with fewer surprises.

Why It's Important

It shrinks feedback loops and aligns teams around business outcomes. Software moves from idea to production with less ceremony and more confidence.

How to Improve DevOps Skills

1. Cultural glue: Shared on-call, blameless postmortems, and working agreements. SLOs and error budgets make trade-offs explicit.
2. Automation everywhere: Build, test, deploy, rollback. Infra via code. Repeatability beats heroics.
3. GitOps and platform thinking: Paved paths, self-service templates, and declarative environments with Argo CD or Flux.
4. Observability: Metrics, logs, traces tied to user journeys. Alert on symptoms, not noise.
5. Security in the pipeline: SAST, SCA, secrets scanning, container/image policies, and runtime protection. DevSecOps without the drama.
6. Policy as code: OPA/Conftest or similar to enforce guardrails pre-merge.
7. ChatOps: Surface deploys, incidents, and metrics in the team’s communication hub for faster coordination.
8. Measure outcomes: Track DORA metrics and tune processes ruthlessly.

Great platforms make the right thing effortless.

How to Display DevOps Skills on Your Resume

7. CI/CD

Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery/Deployment bind code, tests, and environments together so changes glide to production safely.

Why It's Important

Automation makes delivery repeatable and quick. Quality gates lift confidence. Releases stop being cliff jumps.

How to Improve CI/CD Skills

1. Trunk-based development: Short-lived branches, feature flags, and fast merges beat long-running GitFlow branches for most teams.
2. Testing pyramid: Fast unit tests, focused integration tests, and a thin UI layer. Contract tests where services meet.
3. Ephemeral environments: Spin up on pull requests, run tests, tear down. Catch drift and config issues early.
4. Progressive delivery: Blue/green, canary, and automated rollbacks with health checks.
5. Security and supply chain: SBOMs (CycloneDX/SPDX), provenance (SLSA), image signing, and policy gates before prod.
6. Caching and artifacts: Reuse build layers, keep artifact registries canonical, and pin versions.
7. Observability of the pipeline: Track lead time, failure rates, and MTTR for the pipeline itself.
8. Idempotent deploys: Re-running a job shouldn’t break anything. Make it safe by default.

Speed matters. So does control. CI/CD gives you both.

How to Display CI/CD Skills on Your Resume

8. Terraform

Infrastructure as code that spans clouds. Declarative, versioned, and reviewable—so infra changes stop being hand-wavy.

Why It's Important

It standardizes environments, enables automation, and keeps configuration drift in check across providers.

How to Improve Terraform Skills

1. Modules everywhere: Encapsulate patterns. Expose sane variables and outputs. Version modules like you mean it.
2. State safety: Remote state with locking (e.g., S3 plus DynamoDB), encryption at rest, and tight access controls.
3. Environments cleanly: Workspaces or directory-per-env, but not both. Keep variables explicit and secrets out of VCS.
4. Pipelines: Plan on every PR, show diffs, apply only after approvals. Tag releases of infra like app code.
5. Policy and security: Enforce with Sentinel or OPA; scan with tools like tfsec or Checkov.
6. OpenTofu awareness: Know the community fork (OpenTofu) and pick based on licensing and team needs.
7. Composition: Terragrunt (or similar) to orchestrate multi-module, multi-account setups.
8. Testing: Validate modules with unit-style checks and provisions with Terratest. Catch breaking changes early.

Readable plans and small blast radiuses keep weekends quiet.

How to Display Terraform Skills on Your Resume

9. Ansible

Agentless automation for configuration management, orchestration, and app deployment. Simple YAML, powerful results.

Why It's Important

It brings repeatability to infrastructure and app operations. Fewer snowflake servers, more predictable rollouts.

How to Improve Ansible Skills

1. Project hygiene: Roles, clear inventories, group vars, and a sensible directory structure. Collections for reusable content.
2. Performance: Enable pipelining, tune forks, and use the free strategy for concurrency where safe.
3. Security: Ansible Vault for secrets, signed content, and strict SSH hardening. No credentials in plain text.
4. Dynamic inventory: Cloud-native inventory sources for mutable fleets.
5. CI/CD integration: Lint (ansible-lint), test with Molecule, and gate playbooks before they touch prod.
6. Idempotence: Write tasks that can run repeatedly without side effects. Handcraft handlers and check_mode paths.
7. AWX/Automation Platform: Centralize runs, RBAC, schedules, and credentials for teams at scale.
8. Observability: Structured logs and callback plugins for traceability and audits.

Keep playbooks small, focused, and composable. Clarity beats clever.

How to Display Ansible Skills on Your Resume

10. RESTful APIs

HTTP-based interfaces that expose resources and operations with predictable semantics. Human-readable, machine-friendly.

Why It's Important

REST keeps integration simple and scalable. It’s the common tongue for systems that need to talk cleanly.

How to Improve RESTful APIs Skills

1. Design cleanly: OpenAPI 3.1, consistent resource naming, idempotent methods, and clear error models.
2. Version early: Path or header, but pick one and stick to it. Deprecation notices and timelines included.
3. Performance: Pagination, filtering, sparse fieldsets, compression, caching with Cache-Control and ETags.
4. Security: TLS everywhere, OAuth2/OIDC for auth, input validation, and strict scopes. Least privilege for tokens.
5. Status codes that tell the truth: 2xx success, 4xx client issues, 5xx server faults. 429 for rate limits.
6. Rate limiting and quotas: Fair usage via tokens or keys, with headers that communicate limits.
7. Observability: Correlate with trace IDs, structured logs, and metrics at both gateway and service layers.
8. Gateway: Centralize auth, throttling, and WAF rules. Keep services behind a simple, well-governed edge.

Docs matter. Great APIs feel obvious without a tour guide.

How to Display RESTful APIs Skills on Your Resume

11. Agile

Iterative delivery with tight feedback loops and a steady drumbeat of improvement. Plans flex, outcomes stay sharp.

Why It's Important

Architectures evolve as the problem evolves. Agile keeps design tethered to reality rather than wishful thinking.

How to Improve Agile Skills

1. Architecture runway: Just enough upfront design, validated through spikes, ADRs, and small experiments.
2. Flow over friction: Limit WIP, shorten cycles, and slice work so value lands early.
3. Team touchpoints: Architects, engineers, and stakeholders co-create. Whiteboards and metrics, not big documents.
4. Definition of done: Tests pass, docs updated, security checks green, and observability in place.
5. Retros that bite: Actionable improvements with owners and deadlines. Close the loop next sprint.
6. Continuous discovery: Pair customer feedback with telemetry. Roadmaps shift as data speaks.

Good architecture invites change without drama.

How to Display Agile Skills on Your Resume

12. Salesforce

A cloud CRM platform that’s both opinionated and customizable. Sales, service, marketing, analytics, integrations—one ecosystem.

Why It's Important

It centralizes customer data and processes with robust extension points. You can craft tailored solutions without reinventing core CRM.

How to Improve Salesforce Skills

1. Automation modernized: Standardize on Flow for declarative automation. Reserve Apex triggers for complex logic and reuse it well.
2. Dev lifecycle: Source-driven development with scratch orgs or sandboxes, version control, code reviews, and the DevOps Center for releases.
3. Data quality and scale: Strong data models, validation, dedupe rules, archival strategies, and lean sharing rules for performance.
4. Security: Profiles, permission sets, field-level security, Shield (encryption, event monitoring, field audit trail), and Security Health checks.
5. Integration: Use platform events, Change Data Capture, and APIs. MuleSoft or native connectors when complexity grows.
6. Experience layer: Lightning Web Components for modern UI and consistent performance.
7. Analytics: CRM Analytics for dashboards; consider Data Cloud for unified customer profiles when volumes soar.
8. Packaging and reuse: Second-generation packages and modular app design to keep orgs tidy.
9. User adoption: Guided onboarding, in-app prompts, and feedback loops. If users struggle, the design missed.

Keep orgs clean. Guardrails now save rewrites later.

How to Display Salesforce Skills on Your Resume