Technology Evaluation and Selection Questions
Focuses on evaluating technology options and selecting appropriate platforms or vendors. Key skills include defining business and technical requirements, creating evaluation criteria and decision matrices, running proof of concept trials, assessing total cost of ownership and vendor lock in, validating integration feasibility and operational impact, ensuring security and compliance, planning staged rollouts and migrations, and documenting governance for adoption. Interviewers may probe examples of build versus buy decisions and how pilots were used to de risk technology choices.
HardSystem Design
54 practiced
Design a comprehensive technology-evaluation framework for selecting a multi-cloud platform for a global enterprise hosting five application archetypes and 10 PB of data. Include evaluation criteria (latency, egress, data residency, cross-region replication, operational tooling), scoring approach, required PoCs per region/app archetype, migration phasing, and governance controls to manage vendor proliferation.
MediumTechnical
60 practiced
You must advise the VP of Engineering whether to build an in-house analytics dashboard or buy a managed SaaS. Given assumptions: 3 engineers at $150k/year each, 1 SRE at $175k/year, infra $10k/month for 2 years, SaaS license $12k/month, and 3 months integration effort. Outline a 3-year TCO model, list hidden costs, and recommend an option with rationale.
MediumTechnical
44 practiced
Propose a set of quantitative metrics to measure vendor lock-in risk for a SaaS analytics platform. Include how to calculate or estimate each metric (data-export completeness percentage, API portability index, custom-code footprint, egress-cost ratio) and explain how you'd normalize and aggregate them into an overall lock-in risk score.
MediumTechnical
44 practiced
A vendor requires you to store exports in a proprietary binary format that complicates future migrations. As the client's Solutions Architect, outline technical, contractual, and procedural mitigation strategies — such as export automation, on-the-fly conversion, escrow, contract clauses for export rights, and a tested migration path.
HardTechnical
81 practiced
A third-party API enforces strict per-second rate limits that make achieving 99.95% availability from a high-latency APAC region difficult. Propose an architecture to mitigate this including edge caching, local request queuing, batching, circuit breakers, and fallback strategies. Quantify likely added costs and discuss trade-offs for data freshness and consistency.
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