According to the How to avoid row lock or race condition in Apex blog post, one of the ways to prevent race condition in Apex is to use the FOR UPDATE keyword in SOQL statements. The blog post states that "We need to lock the records on which we are working such that other batches or threads will not be having any effect on them. How can we lock a record, then? We need to make use of FOR UPDATE keyword in the SOQL query." Therefore, a data architect should recommend this solution to guarantee that records are not being updated at the same time by different processes.