[cutthegrass2]

In the European companies they are not. From my experience (UK Financial Services primarily), they are equivalent to a US Staff Engineer with authority over Design and Implementation. Typically looking after a team or two of engineers of various levels of experience.

There's also a broad amount of "socialising" the design/system internally to generate "buy-in" across the organisation. Which is the tedious bit for me, but hey, the money is good.

[TheMog]

That makes sense - I'm in the US right now, and here a Solutions Architect is mostly a pre-sales engineer.

Pretty much any growth in my work will require me working on the people skills side of things, which is something I'm already working on.