System Architecture Communication and Documentation Questions

Assess the candidate ability to describe, document, and communicate system architecture both visually and verbally. Candidates should present what a system does and who uses it, identify major components and how they interact, show data flow and integration points, and explain critical architectural decisions and trade offs. Interviewers expect clear diagrams using standard conventions that show high level views, component interactions, and deployment topology, accompanied by concise narrative documentation. Strong answers include multiple views tailored to the audience, labeled diagrams, and justification of design choices while avoiding unnecessary implementation detail. Candidates should be able to discuss scaling strategies, reliability and operational considerations including failure modes, migration paths, observability, and deployment considerations. The scope includes common architectural building blocks such as microservices, application programming interfaces, databases, caching layers, and message buses, as well as consistency and availability implications and service to service communication patterns, and the connection between technical choices and business context.

MediumSystem Design

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Describe how you would annotate an architecture diagram to show observability hotspots, expected throughput per component, acceptable latency budgets along the critical path, and where to place instrumentation. Provide an example annotation for a frontend -> auth -> user-db path with a 200ms latency budget.

MediumTechnical

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Document service-to-service authentication and authorization patterns used across a platform, comparing mTLS, JWT bearer tokens, and token exchange. Include a diagram for each pattern, runtime implications for certificate and key rotation, and how revocation and emergency key roll are handled operationally.

HardTechnical

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A cross-region system uses leader election for write ownership. Document the architecture and explain trade-offs including split-brain risks, leader flapping, latency consequences, and how you would present this design to engineers and to product managers. Include monitoring and automated mitigation strategies in your documentation.

MediumTechnical

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You must capture an operational runbook and annotated diagram for upgrading the API gateway with zero downtime. Provide the runbook outline, the verification gates (metrics and checks), traffic shifting plan, and a sample annotated diagram showing canary traffic and rollback triggers.

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

Document and diagram a message bus architecture for a distributed ingestion pipeline. Include retention policies, partitioning strategy, consumer group semantics, backpressure handling, and the SRE monitoring and alerting thresholds you would include in the documentation.

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