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
#055Locked
Evolve a monolith owned by multiple autonomous engineering teams
Create enforceable domain seams, ownership, delivery independence, and selective extraction without replacing a working monolith with network coupling.
IntermediateEvolution50 min
Technical DebtOrganizational DesignChange Management
#056Locked
Execute a strangler migration when the shared database is the real coupling
Move behavior and data authority in deliberate stages using interception, ownership rules, change capture, shadowing, and enforceable exit criteria.
AdvancedEvolution55 min
Data MigrationZero DowntimeTechnical Debt
#057Locked
Retire a legacy message bus without losing or duplicating business effects
Migrate producers, consumers, retained history, ordering, and operational tooling through a bridge whose own failure modes are explicit.
AdvancedEvolution55 min
Event DrivenData MigrationIdempotency
#058Locked
Split domain ownership without splitting every shared table first
Establish decision rights and write authority through contracts and access controls before a costly physical data decomposition.
AdvancedEvolution55 min
Organizational DesignTechnical DebtApi Design
#059Locked
Migrate a wire protocol across a fleet without a flag day
Negotiate capabilities, preserve forward and backward compatibility, canary mixed versions, and retire old framing with evidence.
AdvancedEvolution60 min
Schema EvolutionZero DowntimeRollback
#060Locked
Prioritize architectural debt as a portfolio of risk and option value
Turn a backlog of disliked systems into quantified constraints, recurring cost, risk exposure, strategic options, and staged investment decisions.
AdvancedEvolution60 min
Technical DebtGovernanceCloud Cost
#061Locked
Reverse a failed microservice decomposition without blaming the teams
Recognize when service boundaries externalize more cost than value, then recombine ownership and runtime safely while preserving learning.
ExpertEvolution75 min
Technical DebtOrganizational DesignReliability
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.