Major Technical Decisions and Trade Offs Questions

Behavioral and leadership oriented topic asking candidates to present real examples of significant technical decisions they influenced. Candidates should prepare two to three concrete examples that cover the problem context, options considered, reasoning and evaluation of trade offs, stakeholder engagement and buy in, the final decision, implementation approach, measured outcomes, and retrospective lessons including what they would do differently. This topic assesses ownership, influence, communication, cross functional collaboration, and ability to defend and learn from organizational level technical choices.

HardSystem Design

0 practiced

As the architect for a public API product, you must decide between serverless (FaaS) and containerized microservices. Prepare a decision paper addressing cold start impact, operational overhead, cost per request at different traffic patterns, vendor lock-in risks, local developer experience, and how a hybrid approach might look.

EasyTechnical

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Describe a time you supported a sales process with architecture recommendations under a tight deadline (RFP or PoC for a client). How did you balance the need for a high-quality, defensible architecture with time-to-proposal constraints and risk of overpromising?

HardSystem Design

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Describe a multi-year initiative you led to migrate a complex monolith into microservices across several product domains. Explain your decomposition strategy (bounded contexts), data migration approach, transitional patterns (strangler), team reorganization, deployment and observability changes, the trade-offs accepted (operational complexity, cost), measurable outcomes, and what you would do differently.

HardTechnical

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In a geo-distributed service that requires localized low-latency reads and some globally consistent writes, choose a consistency model: eventual, causal, or strong. Explain how you mapped operations to consistency requirements, quantified business impact of anomalies, and designed mechanisms to enforce your chosen model in the implementation.

MediumTechnical

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During negotiation for a managed service contract, legal demands strict indemnities while engineering wants flexibility for version upgrades. How do you reconcile legal and technical requirements? Provide concrete clause language or compromise positions (e.g., service credits, phased upgrades, compatibility commitments) and describe the technical migration contingencies you would include.

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