Systems Architecture & Distributed Systems Topics
Large-scale distributed system design, service architecture, microservices patterns, global distribution strategies, scalability, and fault tolerance at the service/application layer. Covers microservices decomposition, caching strategies, API design, eventual consistency, multi-region systems, and architectural resilience patterns. Excludes storage and database optimization (see Database Engineering & Data Systems), data pipeline infrastructure (see Data Engineering & Analytics Infrastructure), and infrastructure platform design (see Cloud & Infrastructure).
Trade-Off Analysis and Justification
Ability to identify key nonfunctional requirements and constraints and to compare alternative designs with clear, quantitative reasoning. Expect discussion of consistency versus availability, latency versus throughput, cost versus performance, operational complexity, and implementation risk. Candidates should demonstrate how to quantify trade offs using metrics such as latency percentiles, throughput, cost per request, and availability targets, how to choose appropriate consistency models and failure modes, and how to document and justify the selected architecture given product and business priorities.
Distributed Systems Security
Security considerations and patterns for distributed systems and multi service environments. Topics include service to service authentication and authorization, key management and secret rotation at scale, implications of eventual consistency for access control decisions, securing inter service communication, distributed logging and auditing, handling security during partial failures and partitioning, Byzantine fault tolerant scenarios and consensus impacts on security, tradeoffs between availability confidentiality and integrity across regions, and designing resilient defenses for systems spanning multiple data centers or organizational boundaries.
Event Driven and Asynchronous Architecture
Designing and operating systems that decouple components using asynchronous messaging and event driven patterns. Covers message queues and brokered communication models (for example Kafka, RabbitMQ, Amazon SQS), publish subscribe patterns, producer consumer workflows, background job and task queue design, and when to prefer asynchronous versus synchronous request response interactions. Includes higher level architectural patterns such as event sourcing, Command Query Responsibility Segregation, sagas for distributed transactions, and patterns for decoupling services. Operational concerns include delivery semantics (at least once, at most once, exactly once), ordering guarantees and partitioning, dead letter queues, retry strategies, idempotency, error handling, monitoring and alerting (for example message lag, queue depth), scaling consumers, throughput and latency trade offs, consistency implications, and common use cases such as email sending, batch processing, file processing, notification delivery, and distributed work coordination.
Complex Technical Projects and Architecture Leadership
Covers recounting and reflecting on leadership and ownership of large scale or complex technical initiatives. Candidates should describe project context, architecture decisions, trade offs, stakeholder management, technology selection, execution challenges, measures of success, and lessons learned. Interviewers assess depth of technical judgment, cross team coordination, trade off communication, and the candidate's specific role in driving architectural outcomes.
Decision Making Under Uncertainty
Focuses on frameworks, heuristics, and judgment used to make timely, defensible choices when information is incomplete, conflicting, or evolving. Topics include diagnosing unknowns, defining decision criteria, weighing probabilities and impacts, expected value and cost benefit thinking, setting contingency and rollback triggers, risk tolerance and mitigation, and communicating uncertainty to stakeholders. This area also covers when to prototype or run experiments versus making an operational decision, how to escalate appropriately, trade off analysis under time pressure, and the ways senior candidates incorporate strategic considerations and organizational constraints into choices.