It's a role that any senior engineer should be able to take. And yes, every senior engineer should be architect-quality, but in some projects, it's useful to en

It's a role that any senior engineer should be able to take. And yes, every senior engineer should be architect-quality, but in some projects, it's useful to ensure that at least one person is tasked with the sole role of keeping an eye on the system as a whole, able to keep the entire platform in their head, and do the dirty work of documenting and cleaning up rough edges. In some cases, the architect can blaze the trail ahead a bit so that everyone else can focus on shipping code, rather than spinning wheels evaluating technical options. If possible, it's a rotating role, with each senior engineering having to do duty as an architect just as he or she would do duty on devops. Maybe you're working on a project that doesn't need that level of overhead. Maybe it's small enough and the system is simple enough. But at some level, the amount of architectural work becomes big enough that its worthwhile having someone on it fulltime.