Trade-off discipline
State what wins, what loses, and which new evidence would reverse the choice.
Architecture Judgment Index
75 system design decisions beyond the standard question bank
Built for Staff, Principal, Architect, and senior engineering leadership interviews. Practice ambiguous trade-offs, migrations, blast-radius reasoning, multi-region consistency, cost, security, and the judgment behind an architecture review.
75
original questions
10
decision domains
2
complete samples
35–90m
interview depth
10 Senior · 30 Staff · 25 Principal · 10 Distinguished
What the interview is really testing
Architecture judgment under incomplete information
These are not component-recitation prompts. Each scenario forces a candidate to identify the decision, make assumptions explicit, protect invariants, plan failure and recovery, price the options, and lead a realistic change from the system and organization that already exist.
Failure and recovery
Define blast radius, degraded behavior, reconciliation, rollback, and operational proof.
Evolutionary delivery
Move from the current architecture through observable, reversible stages instead of a flag day.
Staff-level influence
Connect technical decisions to ownership, incentives, cost, policy, and cross-team execution.
Coverage
Ten decision domains
Balanced across distributed systems, data, reliability, platform, security, performance, evolution, economics, and leadership.
Distributed Systems & Scale
Partitioning, coordination, overload, state movement, and blast-radius decisions in mature distributed systems.
Data Architecture & Consistency
Transaction boundaries, online migrations, residency, backfills, reconciliation, and truthful derived data.
Reliability, Resilience & Recovery
Cascades, brownouts, rollbacks, regional evacuation, disaster recovery, and measurable dependency risk.
APIs, Events & Integration
Long-lived contracts, event evolution, partner workflows, delivery semantics, acquisitions, and global fairness.
Cloud Infrastructure & Platforms
Paved roads, control planes, deployments, identity, scheduling, capacity, and governed self-service platforms.
Security, Privacy & Multi-Tenancy
Isolation boundaries, key management, deletion, zero trust, side channels, audit evidence, and privileged access.
Performance, Observability & Capacity
Tail latency, SLO policy, telemetry economics, uncertain demand, workload isolation, and silent failure detection.
Architecture Evolution & Migrations
Monolith evolution, stranglers, protocol changes, ownership boundaries, debt portfolios, and reversible decompositions.
Cost & Operational Efficiency
Reliability-aware savings, unit economics, tiering, build-versus-buy, carbon, egress, and commitment risk.
Architecture Leadership & Decisions
Decision quality, cross-team alignment, compliance trade-offs, program recovery, platform retirement, and impact.
7 questions
2 complete public walkthroughs
#069Locked
Lead architectural change when strong teams disagree on the destination
Turn competing technical positions into explicit decision criteria, evidence, reversible trials, and durable commitment without forcing false consensus.
IntermediateArchitecture Leadership50 min
Change ManagementOrganizational DesignGovernance
#070Locked
Write an architecture RFC for the unspoken design-review rubric
Structure an RFC around decision quality, evidence, failure, migration, ownership, and reversibility rather than impressive diagrams.
AdvancedArchitecture Leadership50 min
GovernanceChange ManagementReliability
#071Locked
Reconcile business speed, compliance, and reliability constraints in one design
Turn apparently incompatible stakeholder demands into risk classes, product semantics, staged controls, and a decision with accountable exceptions.
AdvancedArchitecture Leadership55 min
ComplianceReliabilityChange Management
#072Locked
Define architecture principles that autonomous teams will actually use
Create testable principles, paved roads, exception evidence, and feedback loops instead of aspirational slogans or a central approval bottleneck.
AdvancedArchitecture Leadership55 min
GovernanceOrganizational DesignChange Management
#073Locked
Recover a failing cross-team architecture program after confidence collapses
Reset scope, authority, milestones, and truth when a strategic migration is late, teams optimize locally, and sunk-cost pressure hides missing value.
AdvancedArchitecture Leadership65 min
Change ManagementOrganizational DesignTechnical Debt
#074Locked
Sunset a platform when the last users are the most powerful stakeholders
Retire long-tail capability through usage evidence, migration economics, exceptions, contractual leverage, and executive accountability.
AdvancedArchitecture Leadership60 min
Change ManagementTechnical DebtGovernance
#075Locked
Measure whether an architecture initiative changed the business or only the diagram
Define causal outcome measures, counterfactuals, leading indicators, unintended effects, and decision gates for multi-quarter architecture investment.
ExpertArchitecture Leadership75 min
GovernanceOrganizational DesignCloud Cost
Build the primitives behind the decisions
Pair the index with InterviewVector's Distributed Systems field manual, system design case studies, and the AI Architect track.