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.
8 questions
2 complete public walkthroughs
#033Locked
Design an internal platform with paved roads and governed exceptions
Create self-service defaults, golden paths, escape hatches, and product feedback so a platform accelerates teams without becoming a central ticket queue.
IntermediateCloud & Platform50 min
Control PlaneGovernanceOrganizational Design
#034Locked
Build a global deployment system with bounded blast radius
Design artifact promotion, cells, health gates, pause authority, and mixed-version safety for thousands of services across regions.
AdvancedCloud & Platform55 min
Control PlaneBlast RadiusRollback
#035Locked
Distribute secrets and configuration without a fleet-wide trust collapse
Separate secret material from configuration, design rotation and last-known-good behavior, and contain compromise across a large workload fleet.
AdvancedCloud & Platform55 min
SecurityControl PlaneRollback
#036Locked
Migrate legacy workloads to workload identity without breaking production
Replace shared service credentials with attested identities through dual authorization, least-privilege discovery, and observable cohort rollout.
AdvancedCloud & Platform50 min
SecurityZero DowntimeChange Management
#037Locked
Choose between a platform build and a managed service under lock-in risk
Make a reversible platform decision using capability gaps, failure ownership, switching cost, differentiated value, and total operational economics.
AdvancedCloud & Platform65 min
Build Vs BuyVendor StrategyCloud Cost
#038Locked
Schedule heterogeneous accelerator workloads with fairness and preemption
Balance scarce GPU shapes, topology, queue fairness, checkpointing, reservations, and utilization across interactive and batch workloads.
AdvancedCloud & Platform65 min
Capacity PlanningMulti TenancyCloud Cost
#039Locked
Reserve regional capacity for failover without paying for an idle mirror
Combine reserved floors, reclaimable workloads, provider diversification, and evacuation tests to make standby capacity both economical and credible.
AdvancedCloud & Platform60 min
Capacity PlanningDisaster RecoveryCloud Cost
#040Locked
Design a governed self-service data platform for conflicting team needs
Enable teams to publish and consume trustworthy data through contracts, policy automation, cost accountability, and federated domain ownership.
ExpertCloud & Platform75 min
GovernancePrivacyMulti Tenancy
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.