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Software Architect
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How do you ensure scalability in an architecture design, and what tradeoffs do you navigate at different scales?

Strong candidates discuss horizontal vs. vertical scaling, stateless service design, caching strategies, database sharding, and the CAP theorem in practical terms. Look for awareness that scalability is a spectrum — architects who design for 10x traffic without understanding current load create over-engineered systems that slow teams down.

Walk me through your process for selecting a technology stack for a new system. What factors drive your decisions?

Mature architects evaluate team expertise, ecosystem maturity, long-term support, operational complexity, and fit for the problem domain — not just personal familiarity or current trends. Look for candidates who can articulate what they'd sacrifice with each choice and how they'd validate a stack selection before committing a full team to it.

Describe a time you solved a major system performance or reliability issue. What was the root cause and how did you address it architecturally?

Look for a systematic diagnostic approach — profiling, distributed tracing, load analysis — followed by an architectural change rather than just a patch. Strong candidates describe what they changed structurally (caching layer, async processing, service decomposition) and what guardrails they put in place to prevent recurrence.

How do you balance business constraints — budget, timeline, team size — with technical requirements when designing a system?

This separates enterprise architects from purely technical thinkers. Look for candidates who describe explicit conversations with product and engineering leadership about tradeoffs, phased delivery strategies, and technical debt as a conscious business decision — not an accident. Architects who ignore constraints create beautiful systems that never ship.

How do you guide and influence development teams to follow architectural standards without becoming a bottleneck?

Strong architects describe lightweight governance: architecture decision records (ADRs), inner-source reference implementations, embedded pairing with teams, and automated linting/fitness functions rather than manual gate reviews. Architects who rely on approval authority alone create bottlenecks and resentment rather than architectural alignment.

How do you approach migrating a legacy monolith to a microservices or event-driven architecture without disrupting production?

Look for the Strangler Fig pattern, domain decomposition based on bounded contexts, anti-corruption layers, and incremental migration with feature flags. Strong candidates emphasize keeping the monolith running and shippable throughout the migration — not a "big bang" rewrite that freezes feature development for months.