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).
Technical Fluency and System Trade Offs
Covers foundational technical understanding needed to partner with engineering teams and to make informed trade off decisions. Topics include basic software architecture concepts application programming interfaces databases deployment pipelines testing strategies and the impact of technical debt. Also includes systems thinking such as how changes propagate through systems and trade offs like performance versus development time or scalability versus simplicity.
Architecture and Technical Trade Offs
Centers on system and solution design decisions and the trade offs inherent in architecture choices. Candidates should be able to identify alternatives, clarify constraints such as scale cost and team capability, and articulate trade offs like consistency versus availability, latency versus throughput, simplicity versus extensibility, monolith versus microservices, synchronous versus asynchronous patterns, database selection, caching strategies, and operational complexity. This topic covers methods for quantifying or qualitatively evaluating impacts, prototyping and measuring performance, planning incremental migrations, documenting decisions, and proposing mitigation and monitoring plans to manage risk and maintainability.
Scalability and Performance
Focuses on capacity planning, performance tradeoffs, and strategies for handling growth. Topics include the relationship between latency, throughput, consistency, and availability, when to accept eventual consistency, vertical versus horizontal scaling, caching, sharding, load distribution, back pressure and throttling patterns, performance testing and benchmarking, capacity forecasting, and triggers for scaling decisions. Candidates should be able to identify bottlenecks, justify tradeoffs between cost and performance, and recommend mitigation approaches for common performance problems.
System Design and Architecture Fundamentals
Comprehensive coverage of designing scalable, reliable, and maintainable software systems, combining foundational concepts, common architectural patterns, decomposition techniques, infrastructure design, and operational considerations. Candidates should understand core principles such as horizontal and vertical scaling, caching strategies and placement, data storage trade offs between relational structured query language databases and non relational databases, application programming interface design, load distribution and fault tolerance. They should be familiar with architectural styles and patterns including client server and layered architectures, monolithic and microservices decomposition, service oriented and event driven designs, gateway and proxy patterns, and resilience patterns such as circuit breakers and asynchronous processing. Assessment includes the ability to decompose a problem into logical components and layers, define component responsibilities, map data flows between ingestion processing storage and serving layers, and select appropriate infrastructure elements such as application servers caches message queues and database replication models. Interviewers evaluate estimation of scale and load and reasoning about trade offs such as consistency versus availability and partition tolerance latency versus throughput coupling versus cohesion and cost versus complexity, and the ability to justify architecture decisions. Candidates should be able to sketch high level designs, communicate architecture to technical and non technical stakeholders, propose migration paths such as when to combine or transition between patterns, and describe operational runbooks including failure mode mitigation monitoring observability and incident recovery. Practical topics include caching eviction policies such as least recently used and least frequently used load balancing approaches such as round robin and least connections rate limiting techniques replication and sharding strategies and design choices for synchronous request response versus asynchronous queue based messaging. Emphasis is on clarifying requirements estimating constraints proposing reasonable architectures and articulating trade offs and evolution paths rather than only low level implementation details.
System Architecture and Design Patterns
High level understanding of system architecture and design patterns covers application programming interfaces, service decomposition and the trade offs between microservice and monolithic approaches, data storage and modeling choices, and consistency availability and partition tolerance considerations. Candidates should be able to reason about scalability strategies such as horizontal scaling, sharding and caching, patterns for resilience including retries backoff and circuit breakers, and choices for asynchronous and event driven architectures. Important complementary topics include observability through logging metrics and distributed tracing, security and authentication, deployment and operational practices, and the cost and timeline implications of architecture decisions. Interview assessments typically test the ability to propose architectures, explain trade offs given constraints on latency throughput reliability and cost, and articulate how design choices affect program complexity maintenance and delivery schedule.
System Architecture and Interface Design
Covers how data moves through systems and how interface design shapes that flow and the overall architecture. Candidates should be able to explain application programming interface design patterns, synchronous versus asynchronous communication, representational state transfer style considerations, contract and versioning strategies, and the performance and scalability implications of those choices. This topic also assesses architecture reasoning: why component boundaries, sequencing, or tooling were chosen, and how those decisions reflect tradeoffs such as scale versus simplicity, speed to market versus robustness, consistency versus availability, and custom solutions versus off the shelf. Include maintainability, observability, and how architecture choices influence team boundaries and operational practices.
Technical Program Architecture and Coordination
Assesses your ability to understand and communicate technical architecture and to coordinate complex engineering work without being the primary engineer. Topics include articulating the high level system architecture major components interfaces and dependencies describing sequencing and integration points across teams identifying technical risks such as scalability integration or technology readiness and proposing mitigations estimating and allocating engineering resources across work streams creating realistic schedules and cutover plans and setting rollout and testing strategies. Interviewers expect clear explanations of design decisions trade offs and how you partnered with engineering to drive execution.
Architecture Trade Offs and Cost Analysis
Covers making and communicating architectural decisions that balance trade offs across cost, performance, reliability, speed to market, and organizational complexity. Topics include comparing architectural approaches and tool selections, estimating and explaining costs such as licensing, implementation, maintenance, compute, storage, and data transfer, and understanding how costs scale. Includes business driven framing of technical decisions, cloud economics including capital expenditure versus operational expenditure, return on investment analysis, and Total Cost of Ownership considerations. Candidates should be able to perform rough cost estimation, describe cost optimization strategies including rightsizing and managed service trade offs, and explicitly articulate constraints and choices when prioritizing features, timelines, and resources.
System Architecture and Tradeoffs
Ability to decompose complex systems into components and define clear responsibilities, interfaces, and interactions. Evaluate architectural alternatives and articulate core trade offs such as consistency versus availability, latency versus throughput, simplicity versus extensibility, and cost versus performance. Explain how design choices affect scalability, resilience, failure modes, and operational burden, and justify architecture decisions based on expected load patterns and business requirements.