A software architect is a software engineer responsible for high-level design choices related to overall system structure and behavior.

It's a software architect's responsibility to match architectural characteristics (aka non-functional requirements) with business requirements. For example:

• Having high customer satisfaction requires availability, fault tolerance, security, testability, recoverability, agility and performance in the system.
• Doing mergers and acquisitions (M&A) requires extensibility, scalability, adaptability, and interoperability.
• Constrained budget and time requires feasibility and simplicity.
• Faster time-to-market requires maintainability, testability and deployability.