Architecture and Technical Trade Offs Questions

Centers on system and solution design decisions and the trade offs inherent in architecture choices. Candidates should be able to identify alternatives, clarify constraints such as scale cost and team capability, and articulate trade offs like consistency versus availability, latency versus throughput, simplicity versus extensibility, monolith versus microservices, synchronous versus asynchronous patterns, database selection, caching strategies, and operational complexity. This topic covers methods for quantifying or qualitatively evaluating impacts, prototyping and measuring performance, planning incremental migrations, documenting decisions, and proposing mitigation and monitoring plans to manage risk and maintainability.

HardSystem Design

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Design a rollout strategy using feature flags and canary releases for a multi-service change that impacts payments and notifications. As PM, list gating criteria before increasing exposure, required observability, automated rollback triggers, and stakeholder communication steps to ensure safe deployment.

MediumTechnical

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You're designing caching for a dashboard where account balances must be fresh but personalized recommendations can be stale. Describe a hybrid caching strategy, invalidation rules, required observability, and how you'd present caching behavior and staleness guarantees to stakeholders.

MediumSystem Design

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Outline an incremental migration plan from a monolith to microservices for an e-commerce checkout flow. As PM, define milestones, success metrics (e.g., latency, error rates, deployment frequency), rollback criteria, and coordination steps to minimize user impact and cross-team friction.

MediumTechnical

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You have four weeks to prototype and measure performance for a new search ranking feature. As PM, define the experiment plan: minimal prototype scope, success criteria, metrics (latency, throughput, relevance signals), test environments (synthetic vs shadow traffic), risk controls, and how you'd escalate findings to stakeholders.

HardSystem Design

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Design an API gateway strategy for a microservices platform that must handle authentication, routing, rate-limiting, request/response transformation, and observability. Discuss risks such as single point of failure, performance bottlenecks, and vendor lock-in, and how you would test and scale the gateway while keeping operational risk low.

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