Platform Architecture for Organizational Scale Questions

Designing internal platforms and infrastructure to support large engineering organizations and evolving teams. Topics include developer experience and self service platform design, deployment platforms that enable safe frequent releases for hundreds of engineers, platform automation and observability patterns that provide cross service visibility, governance and operational policies, service onboarding and lifecycle, and how to evolve platform capabilities as headcount and service count grows. Candidates should discuss trade offs between centralized platform services and team autonomy, metrics for platform health, and approaches to encourage adoption while minimizing operational friction.

HardTechnical

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Create a design for policy-as-code enforcement across 100 Git repositories and 10 cloud accounts that supports fine-grained exceptions, audit trails, and automated remediation for non-compliant resources. Address performance of policy checks, developer friction, and versioning/version control of policies.

HardSystem Design

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Design an evolution plan for an internal platform that started as a centralized PaaS for 50 engineers and must scale to support 2,000 engineers and 5,000 services over the next 3 years. Describe evolution stages, required architectural changes, organizational changes, migration strategy for services, and metrics/signals that indicate readiness to move to the next stage.

HardTechnical

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Case study: A platform automation script inadvertently deleted resources and caused an outage impacting 1,200 services across clusters. As the Solutions Architect lead, outline the post-incident remediation plan: immediate technical fixes, root-cause analysis steps, stakeholder communications, and long-term changes to prevent recurrence (policy, tests, approvals).

HardTechnical

0 practiced

Architect a plan to reduce monthly cloud spend by 30% while maintaining 99.95% availability for critical services. List technical levers (autoscaling, instance families, storage tiers), organizational levers (budgets, chargeback), and a measurement plan with required guardrails and rollback criteria if availability degrades.

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

Name five quick wins a platform architect can apply to reduce cloud spend across thousands of services without impacting developer productivity. For each quick win (e.g., automated rightsizing, shut down idle environments), describe the expected impact and a potential risk or trade-off.

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