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).
Making Difficult Technical Decisions
Situations where you had to make trade-offs, navigate competing priorities, or choose between technical approaches with real consequences.
Scalable and Automated Forensic Analysis
Design and operation of systems and processes to perform high volume forensic analysis efficiently and reliably. Topics include automated triage and artifact extraction, prioritization heuristics, queueing and parallel processing strategies, distributed or cloud based processing, indexing and search for rapid retrieval, false positive management and quality assurance, resource optimization and cost trade offs, integration with orchestration systems, and metrics and monitoring to maintain throughput and reliability at scale.
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.