(In the automation and engineering environments, the hardware engineer or architect encompasses the electronics engineering and electrical engineering fields, with subspecialities in analog, digital, or electromechanical systems.)

The hardware systems architect or hardware architect is responsible for:

• Interfacing with a systems architect or client stakeholders. It is extraordinarily rare nowadays for sufficiently large and/or complex hardware systems that require a hardware architect not to require substantial software and a systems architect. The hardware architect will therefore normally interface with a systems architect, rather than directly with user(s), sponsor(s), or other client stakeholders. However, in the absence of a systems architect, the hardware systems architect must be prepared to interface directly with the client stakeholders in order to determine their (evolving) needs to be realized in hardware. The hardware architect may also need to interface directly with a software architect or engineer(s), or with other mechanical or electrical engineers.
• Generating the highest level of hardware requirements, based on the user's needs and other constraints such as cost and schedule.
• Ensuring that this set of high level requirements is consistent, complete, correct, and operationally defined.
• Performing cost–benefit analyses to determine the best methods or approaches for meeting the hardware requirements; making maximum use of commercial off-the-shelf or already developed components.
• Developing partitioning algorithms (and other processes) to allocate all present and foreseeable (hardware) requirements into discrete hardware partitions such that a minimum of communications is needed among partitions, and between the user and the system.
• Partitioning large hardware systems into (successive layers of) subsystems and components each of which can be handled by a single hardware engineer or team of engineers.
• Ensuring that maximally robust hardware architecture is developed.
• Generating a set of acceptance test requirements, together with the designers, test engineers, and the user, which determine that all of the high level hardware requirements have been met, especially for the computer-human-interface.
• Generating products such as sketches, models, an early user's manual, and prototypes to keep the user and the engineers constantly up to date and in agreement on the system to be provided as it is evolving.