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).
Migration and Modernization Strategy
Covers planning and executing large scale technology transformations such as migrating a monolithic application to microservices, replatforming from on premises to cloud, major framework or database upgrades, and full platform rearchitectures. Includes selection and justification of migration approaches and patterns for different business goals, for example strangler fig, forklift or lift and shift, incremental refactor, big bang replacement, parallel run, and coexistence strategies. Describes phasing and rollout planning to maintain product velocity, sequencing work to maximize business value, and staging and rollback plans to reduce operational and business risk. Addresses data migration planning, validation, consistency and synchronization approaches, testing and verification strategies to minimize downtime and customer impact, and fallback and rollback mechanisms. Covers engineering practices such as deployment automation, continuous integration and continuous delivery, observability and monitoring, and performance and capacity planning. Also includes architectural techniques such as application programming interface wrapping and adapter patterns to enable interoperability between legacy and new systems, governance and compliance considerations, security during migration, cross functional stakeholder communication and coordination, and how to define and measure success through key performance indicators and post migration validation.
Trade Off Analysis and Decision Frameworks
Covers the practice of structured trade off evaluation and repeatable decision processes across product and technical domains. Topics include enumerating alternatives, defining evaluation criteria such as cost risk time to market and user impact, building scoring matrices and weighted models, running sensitivity or scenario analysis, documenting assumptions, surfacing constraints, and communicating clear recommendations with mitigation plans. Interviewers will assess the candidate's ability to justify choices logically, quantify impacts when possible, and explain governance or escalation mechanisms used to make consistent decisions.
Solution and Digital Architecture Thinking
Higher level solution architecture and digital platform thinking focused on building coherent systems that balance business needs and technical feasibility. Topics include translating product requirements into end to end architecture, integration between customer experience layers, data platforms and backend systems, making design trade offs across cost reliability and agility, visualizing solutions with architecture and data flow diagrams, selecting architectural styles such as domain oriented decomposition or event driven approaches, and evaluating architectural patterns for their suitability. This topic also covers architectural depth where candidates discuss advanced patterns and principles they have used or studied, how to evaluate pattern trade offs, and how to design systems that remain coherent as they scale.
Systems Thinking and Interdependencies
Understanding and reasoning about how decisions and changes in one part of a product, system, or organization affect other parts. This includes mapping technical, organizational, market, and user behavior dependencies; identifying feedback loops and cascading effects; anticipating unintended consequences; evaluating trade offs between local optimizations and global outcomes; designing for resilience, observability, and graceful degradation; and using diagrams, dependency graphs, and metrics to communicate systemic impacts. Interviewers assess the candidate for the ability to reason across boundaries, prioritize cross system trade offs, surface hidden coupling, and propose solutions that optimize overall system health rather than only isolated components.
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.
Enterprise Architecture and Solution Design
Covers assessing an organization technical landscape and architecting end to end enterprise solutions. Candidates should be able to evaluate the current as is technology stack including legacy constraints, data architecture, integration patterns, cloud adoption and microservice considerations, and then propose a to be target architecture. Assessment skills include inventorying systems, identifying technical debt, integration touch points, migration risks, and prioritization for transformation. Solution design skills include translating complex business requirements into scalable, reliable, secure and maintainable architectures, selecting appropriate patterns and trade offs, defining data flows, API and integration strategies, and proposing phased rollout and migration approaches that balance technical ideals with business constraints and customer capabilities. Interviewers may probe on non functional requirements, security and compliance, observability and operations considerations, cross team impacts, and how architecture choices affect cost, performance and time to market.
Architecture Evaluation and Feasibility Assessment
Evaluate technical feasibility and architectural implications of proposed transformation solutions, including integration complexity with existing systems, performance and scalability characteristics, operational readiness, security and compliance implications, cost and deployment tradeoffs, and vendor or platform fit. Assessment skills include identifying integration touch points, determining migration and cutover strategies, scoping proofs of concept, articulating failure modes and recovery approaches, and translating technical risks into business impact for stakeholder decision making.
Scale and Complexity Experience
Experience supporting or building large scale systems and complex enterprise environments including high traffic applications, distributed systems, global operations, incident patterns, and operational trade offs. Candidates should be able to discuss scaling bottlenecks, observability strategies, capacity planning, and examples demonstrating handling complexity at product and infrastructure levels.
Technical Feasibility and Architecture Assessment
Assessment of the ability to evaluate technical feasibility and translate product and business requirements into realistic architectural approaches. Topics include decomposing complex problems, identifying architectural constraints and critical path dependencies, evaluating tradeoffs across scalability reliability performance cost and maintainability, estimating unknowns and recommending spikes or proof of concept work to reduce risk, assessing integration complexity with third party systems, and communicating technical tradeoffs and residual risks to both engineering teams and non technical stakeholders.