—By Xin Wang
On April 16th, 2023, DFWCIA hosted an online seminar: Guiding Your Way to Solutions Architect.
First of all, the DFWCIA VP of Public Relations Chao Chen introduced our organization, and the VP of Education Tianyu Cui introduced our speaker Chaoran Wang. Chaoran is a VP and solutions architect leader in JPMC after his 4+ years experience in Amazon. Chaoran introduced the difference between Solutions Architect and Cloud Architect. Then he talked about the day-to-day life of being a Solutions architect. Some of the key activities include a weekly meeting with the Account Manager, an introduction call, a cadence call, an architecture review and a workshop/ immersion day. One topic that a lot of audience asked about and Chaoran introduced is the relationship among Account Managers, Customers and Solutions Architects. It’s amazing to see how different roles are different and how they collaborate together to succeed. A lot of skills are required for this position, for example, technical expertise and breath, communication and presentation skills, business mindset, project management and leadership skills and strategic thinking. The SA interview process for AWS includes OA, Phone Screening and Onsite – 5 rounds, that is, 1 round of general technical, 1 round of system design, 2 rounds of behavioral questions and 1 round of presentation.
About 100 people joined us today. The audience came from different communities, not only from DFW, but also from Canada and all across the US. The audience were truly engaged and the discussions kept going for a long time. Many great questions were asked such as “Does SA have just one or a few customers? Acct managers?” “Is the workshop like a training workshop to teach the customers how to use the AWS services to build their systems?” “Any recommended learning/training resources to develop the 8 required skills?” and a lot of deep and solid technical discussions happened during the seminar. The audience learned a lot about Solutions Architect today. Thank you everyone for joining us today and we look forward to seeing you in our future event!
