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).
Architecture and Technical Trade Offs
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.
Salesforce and Customer Relationship Management Architecture
Covers design, governance and operational practices for enterprise customer relationship management platforms with emphasis on data model, security and maintainability. Candidates should be able to describe object and relationship design to support multiple sales motions, field and record hierarchies, role based sharing and permission models, validation rules and declarative automation versus programmatic customization. Expect discussion of environment strategy and release management, testing and change control, strategies for data quality and deduplication, and integration patterns and data synchronization using application programming interfaces and middleware. Interviewers will assess trade offs between scalability, usability and performance when supporting sales development representatives, account executives and strategic account teams.
CRM and Sales Technology Architecture
Design and optimization of CRM and sales operations technology, treating the CRM as the operational backbone of revenue teams. Topics include CRM data model design, lead and opportunity management, activity tracking, account structure, forecasting and reporting, customization versus configuration, integrations with engagement, telephony, revenue operations tooling, analytics and warehouses, and governance. Consider operational processes, scaling, permissioning, data quality, and how CRM architecture supports sales motions and metrics.
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.