Your duty as the lead architect is to manage the designing of private and state-owned structures. Your responsibility is extended to you drawing up and discussing budgets with clients, determining design specifications, and setting up contracts.
As the lead architect, it is also your responsibility to identify constraints in the design specifications that may reduce the life cycle of your structure. You are also required to revise the design specifications and make improvements that will result in the structure having a much longer life cycle. When bringing your thoroughly designed structure to life, it is your duty to select equipment and methodology that will ensure that your structure outlives its lifespan.
The skills required in order to be a formidable lead architect include strong imaginary, design, and creative skills. You also need to be highly organized, pay attention to detail, and have extensive knowledge of the built environment. In order to become a lead architect, you need to undertake a bachelor's degree in architecture and have enough experience in the field to become a lead architect.
Lead Architect Overview
Lead Architect Careers
There is more than meets the eye when it comes to being a lead architect. For example, did you know that they make an average of $46.1 an hour? That's $95,888 a year!
Between 2018 and 2028, the career is expected to grow 21% and produce 284,100 job opportunities across the U.S.
What Does a Lead Architect Do
There are certain skills that many lead architects have in order to accomplish their responsibilities. By taking a look through resumes, we were able to narrow down the most common skills for a person in this position. We discovered that a lot of resumes listed organizational skills, technical skills and visualization skills.
When it comes to the most important skills required to be a lead architect, we found that a lot of resumes listed 12.9% of lead architects included architecture, while 7.9% of resumes included cloud, and 5.6% of resumes included infrastructure. Hard skills like these are helpful to have when it comes to performing essential job responsibilities.
When it comes to searching for a job, many search for a key term or phrase. Instead, it might be more helpful to search by industry, as you might be missing jobs that you never thought about in industries that you didn't even think offered positions related to the lead architect job title. But what industry to start with? Most lead architects actually find jobs in the technology and finance industries.
How To Become a Lead Architect
If you're interested in becoming a lead architect, one of the first things to consider is how much education you need. We've determined that 47.4% of lead architects have a bachelor's degree. In terms of higher education levels, we found that 40.5% of lead architects have master's degrees. Even though most lead architects have a college degree, it's impossible to become one with only a high school degree or GED.
Choosing the right major is always an important step when researching how to become a lead architect. When we researched the most common majors for a lead architect, we found that they most commonly earn bachelor's degree degrees or master's degree degrees. Other degrees that we often see on lead architect resumes include doctoral degree degrees or diploma degrees.
You may find that experience in other jobs will help you become a lead architect. In fact, many lead architect jobs require experience in a role such as senior software engineer. Meanwhile, many lead architects also have previous career experience in roles such as software engineer or lead technician.
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Lead Architect Career Paths
As you move along in your career, you may start taking on more responsibilities or notice that you've taken on a leadership role. Using our career map, a lead architect can determine their career goals through the career progression. For example, they could start out with a role such as project manager, progress to a title such as information technology director and then eventually end up with the title senior director of information & technology.
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Tell us your goals and we'll match you with the rights job to get there.
Average Salary for a Lead Architect
Best Paying Cities
Recently Added Salaries
Job TitleCompany  | Company | Start Date | Salary |
|---|---|---|---|
Deloitte Talend Lead/Architect Talend Lead/Architect | Deloitte Deloitte | 03/22/2021 03/22/2021 | $89,00003/22/2021 $89,000 |
Interior Talent Licensed Architect-Studio Leader Licensed Architect-Studio Leader | Interior Talent Interior Talent | 03/19/2021 03/19/2021 | $125,00003/19/2021 $125,000 |
IBM Corporation Network Lead Architect Network Lead Architect | IBM Corporation IBM Corporation | 03/10/2021 03/10/2021 | $128,00003/10/2021 $128,000 |
Motion Recruitment Partners Cyber Architect/IAM Lead Cyber Architect/IAM Lead | Motion Recruitment Partners Motion Recruitment Partners | 03/10/2021 03/10/2021 | $114,78503/10/2021 $114,785 |
Management Decisions, Inc. Cyber Architect/IAM Lead Cyber Architect/IAM Lead | Management Decisions, Inc. Management Decisions, Inc. | 03/04/2021 03/04/2021 | $125,22003/04/2021 $125,220 |
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Lead Architect Resumes
Designing and figuring out what to include on your resume can be tough, not to mention time-consuming. That's why we put together a guide that is designed to help you craft the perfect resume for becoming a Lead Architect. If you're needing extra inspiration, take a look through our selection of templates that are specific to your job.
Learn How To Write a Lead Architect Resume
At Zippia, we went through countless Lead Architect resumes and compiled some information about how best to optimize them. Here are some suggestions based on what we found, divided by the individual sections of the resume itself.
View Detailed InformationTop Colleges for Lead Architects
1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, MA • Private
2. Stanford University
Stanford, CA • Private
3. Harvard University
Cambridge, MA • Private
4. Duke University
Durham, NC • Private
5. University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA • Private
6. Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta, GA • Public
7. Cornell University
Ithaca, NY • Private
8. Georgetown University
Washington, DC • Private
9. Dartmouth College
Hanover, NH • Private
10. Northwestern University
Evanston, IL • Private
Top Skills For a Lead Architect
The skills section on your resume can be almost as important as the experience section, so you want it to be an accurate portrayal of what you can do. Luckily, we've found all of the skills you'll need so even if you don't have these skills yet, you know what you need to work on. Out of all the resumes we looked through, 12.9% of lead architects listed architecture on their resume, but soft skills such as organizational skills and technical skills are important as well.
- Architecture, 12.9%
- Cloud, 7.9%
- Infrastructure, 5.6%
- Procedures, 5.0%
- API, 4.8%
- Other Skills, 63.8% See All Lead Architect Skills
Best States For a Lead Architect
Some places are better than others when it comes to starting a career as a lead architect. The best states for people in this position are New Jersey, California, Maryland, and New Hampshire. Lead architects make the most in New Jersey with an average salary of $111,226. Whereas in California and Maryland, they would average $111,009 and $110,748, respectively. While lead architects would only make an average of $110,129 in New Hampshire, you would still make more there than in the rest of the country. We determined these as the best states based on job availability and pay. By finding the median salary, cost of living, and using the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Location Quotient, we narrowed down our list of states to these four.
1. New Jersey
$111,226
Avg. Salary
2. Rhode Island
$101,272
Avg. Salary
3. Maryland
$110,748
Avg. Salary
How Do Lead Architect Rate Their Jobs?
Top Lead Architect Employers
We've made finding a great employer to work for easy by doing the hard work for you. We looked into employers that employ lead architects and discovered their number of lead architect opportunities and average salary. Through our research, we concluded that Wipro was the best, especially with an average salary of $84,215. IBM follows up with an average salary of $101,205, and then comes Accenture with an average of $119,085. In addition, we know most people would rather work from home. So instead of having to change careers, we identified the best employers for remote work as a lead architect. The employers include Hallmark, GlobalLogic, and UnitedHealth Group
Lead Architect Videos
