Hiring a AWS Solutions Architect?
Your team is hiring; I run the technical round for you. One 60-minute live interview per candidate, with a scored written recommendation back within 12 hours.
About the role — Designs AWS systems other engineers build. Judgement matters more than recall.
What you get
A 60-minute live interview with a scored written recommendation back within 12 hours. No retainer; fee quoted on the scoping call.
01 — Why this role is hard to assess
Certification proves recall, not judgement. A candidate can name every service and still design a system that falls over under its first real traffic spike. The failure mode is confident architecture that has never been operated.
02 — What the 60 minutes covers
The specific ground, not a generic checklist.
- Designing for a stated availability target, and defending the cost of it
- Where they would accept eventual consistency, and where they would not
- Multi-AZ versus multi-region: when the second is genuinely justified
- Reading an existing architecture diagram and naming its single points of failure
03 — A scenario from the round
A monolith on EC2 is hitting database connection limits during a daily batch window. Walk me through what you would investigate, in order, and what you would change first. I will push back on the easy answer.
Scenarios rotate between candidates so the round stays fair, and none of the published examples are used verbatim.
What I listen for
Failure modes specific to this role
- Reaches for a managed service without asking what the workload actually does
- Cannot explain the cost consequences of their own design
- Describes multi-region as a default rather than a trade-off
- Has never had to undo an architectural decision
Scored on
- Architectural judgement
- Cost awareness
- Failure-mode thinking
- Trade-off articulation
- Communication under challenge
Each dimension is scored with written rationale. You get the reasoning, not just the number.
Next step
Hiring a AWS Solutions Architect this quarter?
Fifteen minutes to agree the rubric, then I run the round. One candidate or twenty — there is no retainer and no minimum.