Systems Architecture & Distributed Systems Topics
Large-scale distributed system design, service architecture, microservices patterns, global distribution strategies, scalability, and fault tolerance at the service/application layer. Covers microservices decomposition, caching strategies, API design, eventual consistency, multi-region systems, and architectural resilience patterns. Excludes storage and database optimization (see Database Engineering & Data Systems), data pipeline infrastructure (see Data Engineering & Analytics Infrastructure), and infrastructure platform design (see Cloud & Infrastructure).
Long Term Sustainability and Scalability of Solutions
Designing infrastructure that will remain maintainable and effective over 3-5 years. Considering technical debt, documentation, knowledge transfer, and how solutions will evolve. Discussion of reducing operational burden and building systems that scale gracefully as demands grow.
System Design and Documentation
Addresses how system design and architecture choices affect documentation needs and how documentation architecture should mirror system architecture. Topics include deciding what to document, audience and user journey considerations, documenting key concepts and failure modes, versioning and maintenance of documentation, mapping documentation to system components and APIs, and strategies to make documentation discoverable and useful for onboarding and troubleshooting. Candidates should demonstrate systems thinking about documentation, including tooling, structure, ownership, and automated documentation generation where appropriate.
Systems Thinking and Interdependencies
Understanding and reasoning about how decisions and changes in one part of a product, system, or organization affect other parts. This includes mapping technical, organizational, market, and user behavior dependencies; identifying feedback loops and cascading effects; anticipating unintended consequences; evaluating trade offs between local optimizations and global outcomes; designing for resilience, observability, and graceful degradation; and using diagrams, dependency graphs, and metrics to communicate systemic impacts. Interviewers assess the candidate for the ability to reason across boundaries, prioritize cross system trade offs, surface hidden coupling, and propose solutions that optimize overall system health rather than only isolated components.
Systems Thinking and Architecture
Approaching technical problems with holistic systems thinking that accounts for interactions across services, people, processes, and business goals. Includes evaluating trade offs between scalability, reliability, performance, security, cost, and operability; reasoning about system boundaries, feedback loops, emergent behavior, and long term technical debt; designing socio technical systems and aligning architecture with organizational structure; and communicating architectural trade offs and decision rationale. Questions probe the candidate's ability to reason about cross cutting impacts, plan iterative architectural evolution, and make principled design choices under uncertainty.
Technical Depth and System Understanding
Demonstrated ability to quickly grasp complex technical domains and explain system design, architecture, and tradeoffs. Cover distributed systems fundamentals, application programming interfaces, software architecture patterns, performance and scalability concerns, reliability considerations, and approaches to validating technical accuracy. In interviews, present concrete examples from projects that highlight how you diagnosed technical problems, evaluated alternatives, and made design decisions while communicating clearly to non technical stakeholders.
System Architecture and Integration
Evaluates a candidate's ability to reason about high level system architecture, component interactions, and integration patterns used to build production services. Candidates should be able to visualize major components and the flow of requests and data between them, and to explain client server models, multi tier layered architecture, routing from ingress through load balancing to auto scaled compute instances, and trade offs between monolithic and microservice approaches. Expect discussion of service boundaries and loose coupling; synchronous application programming interfaces and asynchronous messaging; event driven and publish and subscribe architectures; message queues, retry and backoff patterns; caching strategies; and approaches to data consistency and state management. Integration concerns include application programming interfaces, adapters and connectors, extract transform load processes, data synchronization, data warehousing, and the trade offs between real time streaming and batch processing and single source of truth. Candidates should reason about scalability, reliability, availability, redundancy, failover, fault tolerance, latency and throughput trade offs, security boundaries, and common failure modes and bottlenecks. They should also address operational considerations such as monitoring, logging, observability, deployment implications and run books, and explain how architectural choices influence team boundaries, delivery timelines, dependency complexity, testing strategy, maintainability, and operability. Answers should demonstrate clear explanation of design decisions and trade offs without requiring low level implementation detail, and the ability to communicate architecture to both technical and non technical audiences.
Complex Technical System Learning
Ability to rapidly learn and build correct mental models of large, unfamiliar technical systems and architectures. Candidates should be able to explain their process for onboarding to a codebase or system, including reading architecture and design documents, inspecting diagrams and code paths, using runtime observation and traces, running simple experiments, and asking targeted questions of engineers and stakeholders. Assessment topics include distributed systems fundamentals and tradeoffs such as consistency and availability choices, scalability and partitioning patterns, microservices boundaries, event driven and asynchronous processing, failure modes and recovery strategies, caching, replication, and observability and monitoring. At senior or staff levels, expectations include synthesizing and documenting system knowledge, communicating complexity to diverse audiences, identifying documentation gaps, creating onboarding guides, leading architecture walkthroughs, and mentoring others to understand the system.
Decision Making Under Uncertainty
Focuses on frameworks, heuristics, and judgment used to make timely, defensible choices when information is incomplete, conflicting, or evolving. Topics include diagnosing unknowns, defining decision criteria, weighing probabilities and impacts, expected value and cost benefit thinking, setting contingency and rollback triggers, risk tolerance and mitigation, and communicating uncertainty to stakeholders. This area also covers when to prototype or run experiments versus making an operational decision, how to escalate appropriately, trade off analysis under time pressure, and the ways senior candidates incorporate strategic considerations and organizational constraints into choices.