How to hire a Solutions Architect
What the role does, the job description, the interview questions, and the 40-minute screening pack that tells you who can do the job before you book a single interview.
The role
What a Solutions Architect does
A Solutions Architect sits in the Engineering function. The sections below give you the job description, the interview questions and the screening pack for the role.
Screen before you interview
The Solutions Architect screening pack
Systems, cloud, engineering fundamentals and explaining them to buyers. Every applicant gets one link. You get one ranked report.
- 1
Whiteboard the architecture for a system you designed recently.
- 2
How do you translate a customer's business problem into a technical design?
- 3
Describe a trade-off you made between cost, speed and reliability.
- 4
How do you handle a customer who wants the wrong solution?
- 5
Which cloud services do you reach for first, and why?
Interview questions
Solutions Architect interview questions
For the candidates who pass the pack. Each comes with a sample answer on the full page.
Ask these after the screening pack, not instead of it. A candidate who has already scored on Computer System Architecture, Advanced Networking in AWS, Software Engineer, Presentation Skills has shown they can do the work, which frees the interview to do what a test cannot: find out how they think, how they explain themselves, and how they behave when something goes wrong.
- Ask every Solutions Architect candidate the same questions in the same order. Comparable answers are the whole point; a different conversation with each person tells you who you liked, not who was strongest.
- Look for a specific example with a result, not a description of how the candidate would approach it in principle. Follow up once with “what happened next?” and stop talking.
- Score each answer before moving to the next question, and write down what was said rather than the impression it left.
- At volume, record the first 4 of these instead of calling. Candidates answer on their own time, the answers are transcribed and scored, and you keep live interviews for the shortlist.
The pack takes a candidate about 40 minutes, so a Solutions Architect applicant arrives at this interview already measured on the parts you can measure without a meeting.
- 01
What drew you to the solutions architect role rather than staying purely in engineering?
- 02
Describe a solution you architected end to end.
- 03
How do you keep current across such a broad set of technologies?
- 04
Who are the stakeholders you typically work with, and how do you manage them?
- 05
How do you decide between a monolithic and a microservices architecture?
- 06
How do you approach non-functional requirements like scalability and availability?
- 07
How do you factor cost into an architecture?
- 08
How do you design for security and compliance in an architecture?
Frequently asked questions
Send every applicant one link that carries 4 skills tests (Computer System Architecture, Advanced Networking in AWS, Software Engineer, Presentation Skills), a personality inventory and 5 one-way video questions. springhire scores everything automatically and ranks the candidates, so you interview the top few. The free plan covers 10 candidates a month.
About 40 minutes for the tests, plus 10 to 15 minutes for the video questions. Candidates complete it on their own time, on any device.
A short brief, key responsibilities, must-have and nice-to-have skills and the requirements. The JD generator writes one for this role in a minute.
Questions that ask for a specific past example and a walkthrough of how the candidate thinks. This page lists 8 with sample answers, and the full bank has more.
Yes. The free plan includes every screening tool with 10 candidate credits a month and no card. Paid plans start at $39 a month.
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