well, it varies a lot - not all solutions architects do architect work.

to quote myself from here before;

I love the job, been an engineer in it about 12 months now, lots of variety, great management, good development and growth etc.

my day to day varies a lot - I can be doing anything from reviewing existing environments, planning new ones, travelling abroad, building huge infrastructure for massive companies, doing migrations, writing scripts, scripting infrastructure, taking exams, studying, all sorts. Travel isn't mandatory, and you can ask not to. As much as possible they'll take your consideration into account. But i like the travel - i've been in NYC, Long Island, Buffalo etc for a month or so each in the last year.

At Cloudreach we have engineers, architects as separate roles and they do different things. Architects tend to be more involved with overall design of the project, and not so much with the simpler implementation tasks, which is more for engineers.

pre-sales work used to be fairly small, but its moved to a dedicated person(s) now as we are growing so much. Most of my time is on projects that vary from 1 week to 3 months in length.

The career outlook for me is fantastic - I've already seen a lot of opportunities internally as we grow, and externally I get a LOT of linkedin interest, even without actively promoting some of the massive worldwide companies that i've worked with.

A large part of why I love it is because Cloudreach is such a fantastic place to work - I don't know if it'd be the same in other companies.

We don't interact with AWS support that much - since we have such an experienced AWS team in house, 99% of things can be sorted without involving them, but when we do it's fine.