Trade-off discipline
State what wins, what loses, and which new evidence would reverse the choice.
Loading the Architecture Judgment Index
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.
Scheduled public access
No sign-in is required during this twelve-month window. After it ends, the two permanent public samples remain open and Pro access resumes for the other guides.
What the interview is really testing
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.
State what wins, what loses, and which new evidence would reverse the choice.
Define blast radius, degraded behavior, reconciliation, rollback, and operational proof.
Move from the current architecture through observable, reversible stages instead of a flag day.
Connect technical decisions to ownership, incentives, cost, policy, and cross-team execution.
Don't just read — rehearse
Reading a rubric is not the same as performing under one. The AI Judgment Coach puts you in the seat: pick a decision, talk through your answer, and get graded on the same Staff-level rubric — with your specific strengths, the gaps you missed, and the follow-up a real interviewer asks next.
Coverage
Balanced across distributed systems, data, reliability, platform, security, performance, evolution, economics, and leadership.
Partitioning, coordination, overload, state movement, and blast-radius decisions in mature distributed systems.
Transaction boundaries, online migrations, residency, backfills, reconciliation, and truthful derived data.
Cascades, brownouts, rollbacks, regional evacuation, disaster recovery, and measurable dependency risk.
Long-lived contracts, event evolution, partner workflows, delivery semantics, acquisitions, and global fairness.
Paved roads, control planes, deployments, identity, scheduling, capacity, and governed self-service platforms.
Isolation boundaries, key management, deletion, zero trust, side channels, audit evidence, and privileged access.
Tail latency, SLO policy, telemetry economics, uncertain demand, workload isolation, and silent failure detection.
Monolith evolution, stranglers, protocol changes, ownership boundaries, debt portfolios, and reversible decompositions.
Reliability-aware savings, unit economics, tiering, build-versus-buy, carbon, egress, and commitment risk.
Decision quality, cross-team alignment, compliance trade-offs, program recovery, platform retirement, and impact.
8 questions
All 75 guides free until July 31, 2027
Create self-service defaults, golden paths, escape hatches, and product feedback so a platform accelerates teams without becoming a central ticket queue.
Design artifact promotion, cells, health gates, pause authority, and mixed-version safety for thousands of services across regions.
Separate secret material from configuration, design rotation and last-known-good behavior, and contain compromise across a large workload fleet.
Replace shared service credentials with attested identities through dual authorization, least-privilege discovery, and observable cohort rollout.
Make a reversible platform decision using capability gaps, failure ownership, switching cost, differentiated value, and total operational economics.
Balance scarce GPU shapes, topology, queue fairness, checkpointing, reservations, and utilization across interactive and batch workloads.
Combine reserved floors, reclaimable workloads, provider diversification, and evacuation tests to make standby capacity both economical and credible.
Enable teams to publish and consume trustworthy data through contracts, policy automation, cost accountability, and federated domain ownership.
Pair the index with InterviewsVector's Distributed Systems field manual, system design case studies, and the AI Architect track, and the senior Java production track, and the Angular architecture interview track.
The rest of the senior-engineering interview toolkit.