Staff and Technical Leadership Progression Questions
Explain your progression into staff or senior technical leadership roles, highlighting technical depth, architecture ownership, cross team influence, scope and scale of systems you owned, and organization wide initiatives. Discuss specific technical milestones, examples of large scale technical decisions you made, evidence of mentoring or enabling other teams, and measurable business or system impacts that demonstrate readiness for staff or principal level responsibilities.
EasyTechnical
0 practiced
List and explain five metrics or KPIs you would use to demonstrate cross-team impact as you progress toward staff-level responsibilities. For each metric, state how you'd collect it, what a positive change looks like, and an example target or threshold you might set.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
Define six architecture principles you would set for a cross-product platform (for example: secure-by-default, observable, cost-conscious). For each principle explain why it's important and give one concrete rule or guardrail (lint rule, policy-as-code, mandatory smoke tests) to ensure compliance.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
Case study: Design a multi-tenant API gateway and extensibility model for a SaaS platform that must support tenant-specific rate limits, custom authentication, and plugin-based request transformations. Describe components, a tenant-config data model, scaling strategy, and how you'd test tenant isolation and security.
EasyTechnical
0 practiced
Explain the difference between technical leadership and people management in the context of a Solutions Architect role. How should success be measured differently for each, and what behaviors distinguish a strong technical leader from a line manager?
HardTechnical
0 practiced
Propose a system and workflow to create, review, search, and maintain Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) at scale across many teams. Include tooling choices (repo structure, search index), metadata schema, ownership model, discoverability features, and lifecycle rules (approval, deprecation).
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