AWS 솔루션 아키텍트 면접 완벽 대비법 + 현직 헤드 비법 공개!

could you give us some examples of some of the most popular behavioral questions that you ask essays and what makes a good [Music] answer hey everybody thanks for joining us for the second session with sarab a a uh current uh author and expert at Solutions architecture over at AWS uh my name is Nick Lee I'm a Solutions architect at tekon and S Rob would you like to introduce yourself hi everyone and thanks Nick for having me in the exponent Channel again and uh I'm s of sasta I'm based of Seattle working with AWS since eight and a half year over two decade of the experience I'm the author of The Three bestselling book in the solution architect domain and uh I'm worldwide solution architect leader in the AWS leading team of Architects awesome well we're we're super excited to have you here s and uh in today's session we'll actually be going one level deep on interview tactics and strategy for folks who are potentially interviewing for their first Solutions architecture job would love to just kick it off maybe at a high level um just explaining uh the the general interview pattern for an essay role uh what are the kinds of interviews that are involved and for for each what are some of the key things that they're looking for yeah so I can talk about uh I think uh AWS is one of the most rigorous process if I will cover that it might be cover a lot of things right and if people will prepare that in the mindset then they can track any interview okay at least most of them not any but most of them okay so uh one things people should expect always there is a one telephonic screen and written written like uh there will be some architecture diagram there where uh we may ask uh what are the different issues as there need to fix or give some script and says that whether it will spin up the entire infrastructure or not and ask that uh um if I have the website and because and this is the I will say terraform script or cloud formation script is there which have entire um website um the tech stack is there these two Tech stack could be on the web layer application layer and database layer and maybe you can ask currently it is not able to connect to the internet okay so what is the problem there or this is the architecture do you think this architecture is highly available and it is good for the disaster recovery so there is some scenario in the written where people need to uh work through that and give very thorough answer on it okay think about all the possibilities it is always subjective because we want to see that how broad and how deep solution architect can go and by design it is not the uh it is not the multiple choice things right because that become a very tactical you cannot understand the depth of the knowledge and then second is uh when we people go to the phone screen and phone screen is uh mostly understand when whether I should call this person on site or not okay and that's where it uh required a screening through all Ty all sort of the tech domain and Tech domain normally we look for the 200 200 to 250 level in multiple Cod Tech domain like a storage networking database and um and infrastructure application development all those area 200 level but one area you can tell that hey I have dive deep on that right so everyone coming from the different domain so the person who's coming from the software they will say I have on application Development coming from the networking they will say I can talk about the n ever security can talk about security so one domain people can go deep also on that it is all in telephonic and it will be mostly 80% take and 20% understand the soft skill whether you have you have the pre-sales skill or not have you ever involved in uh doing the rfps like request for proposal building and all those things and once that uh uh able to pass the phone screening then it goes to the on-site interview and especially in AWS there is a five round of interview and those five round of interview can cover the different domains and AWS or overall Amazon has the 16 leadership principles so it often based on the leadership principle and uh it doesn't means those question will be soft skills question uh but those question will be like a very uh whatever you have based on that so we called it behavioral question it means we are not going to give you the hypothetical situation most of the time we will understand what you have done in the past so rather than asking uh how to design a three tier architecture the question will be tell me a time when you have built a a complex architecture okay which helps the customer to launch their product right so you have to go back think go back in me your memory memory lane and talk about about what you have built in the past and that's the idea is to understand your practical experience what you have done rather than giving the hypothetical sometime you can get one or two when we want to understand the tech depth of the particular things and then there will be more follow-up question to understand more detail on that and uh so there will be couple of round will be Tech maybe the system design maybe understanding what is the breadth of the uh architecture or technology you have and what is the depth of architecture and Technology you have and that will be based on your example only what example you have given then there will be a round on the business where someone from the business person will take the interview and understand how will you understand the business like your pre-sales skill are you able to talk to the C Level executive and are you able to convince that person with your Tech skill and kind of able to work backward from the business requirement and uh and then there will be around Amazon always has the bar razor around so that person comes and understand if you are the culture fit or company fit right and that again based on the some question based on your experience and then hiring manager understand okay whether this person is team fit or not right so these are the high level uh rounds out there and uh so if you prepare for all those rounds then I think you will be you can correct any interview thanks for that outline of all those different rounds uh you mentioned one of them was talking about a past project that somebody implemented a complex project could you provide some guidance on how people should think about which project to select for that question and uh maybe what what is an example of a good project versus a bad project to use for that question so first of all let's think how to answer that okay so there is two way you can answer first is you take the star methodology so you talk about the situation task action and result okay so if you are selecting any scenario you tell what was the situation there it means what the pain point you are trying to solve or what Gap you were trying to solve and the task it uh task is based on that situation what think you list out which will help to solve that problem and action is how you implemented those list okay those task and result is what was the impact and outcome on that that is one methodology second is the SBI we call it this that is situation Behavior impact right and uh most of the software skill side or business question side I recommend to go SPI and uh and on the tax side I say go to Star but you can use any method anywhere and SBI is first talk about the situation again it is working backward from the customer problem what problem you are trying to solve and behavior is is what was the pattern you saw there and what you did about that pattern what Behavior you shown to solve that pattern which is nothing but translate to your task and action and impact is again what was the outcome so when you talked about one past project I was say take take something which is more holistic and stragic uh don't take one of the instances okay so one of the instances right if someone will say that there was a I worked in in one of the project where database was not coming up okay and then I went and I find out there was a database lock in the queue and then I did some vacuum and clear the Q start and problem got resolved that is very transactional and tactical things right so it may not fly in the solution arct interview it may fly in the other interview maybe the data engineer or DBA kind of interview right here people are looking for more holistic architecture and the same things how you can represent same things you can talk about there was a take the holistic architecture it application layer there was a performance issue and how this performance issue is happening because user was was not able to load the page right and why they are not able to load the page because you track back to the business layer you find that business layer is not able to fetch the query and why they are not able to fetch the query because database having the issue right and when you are solving the problem it is not for the instance you're thinking about the future if that lock happen in the database yeah at the moment shortterm solution I can clear out the cash and all solve but it should not happen again am I missing because of the multiple transaction going on to the database we should not go C should I put the caching layer there on the top okay and uh try to Cache the result there for the frequent query or should I reduce the database load at some point by separating out the uh reporting if reporting pointing to the main database can I have the read activity in the read replica rather than the main datab right and then you also think about at the application layer can I put some uh mutex or sema4 is there we should not do the parallel request right so all those different layer how you will address that also you need to think about so to summarize if you are trying to pick the example for the most complex architecture go back in memory L and think about something and prepare in in advance once so believe me it doesn't matter how well you have work done you suddenly that question someone suit to you you will like get lost and that's what I recommend people to build a uh interview guide and you will find that advice in my interview solution arct interview book where I have put how to build the interview guide take five seven example and each example put in Star Format and think about uh what the impact it it drove so it it should not be just about uh so I talked about mostly the situation and action but impact prospec if you will see in this scenario it is not just about the unlocking database or clearing the queue and all it's about reducing the load time page load time for customer from the 10 second to 5 second that is the good impact and that also uh improve the not only improve the performance but improve the customer satisfaction and uh then how you document that practice and scale it to others did you take the initiative and think about hey this is the problem here is other application also having the same problem did you do the proactive audit as a architect right so how you are scaling your learning that is another important things so all these criteria is required right so impact and then scaling I will add one more Star Plus scale now that's that's awesome feedback so it sounds like project Choice looking at something that is multiple levels of complexity not just a simple transactional like debugging a database problem and tying it back to uh impact the outcomes that happened uh but also you gave a a nice piece of advice to uh you know take five to seven of your projects and actually put it in the star method uh and make sure it's fresh in your mind so that when you interview it's it comes out and it shines right right so I would like to add one more things when you're taking this five to seven example ask question to yourself right and prepare some followup and be ready for that so if you have put in a Star Format after that the question going to come so so what what what was the challenges where when you are implementing your action right and uh there should be always the challenges is if you really done the job right and then you should ready to answer that there is what are the key performance measure what are the kpi you measure on that how you quantify that okay and third is what was your lesson learn if you will do it today again how will do you how will you do it differently so these three question always prepare as a followup with all your examples so you also mentioned during the interview process there are some behavioral questions could you give us some examples of some of the most popular behavioral questions that you ask essays and what makes a good answer for each of those yes so one one of my favorite behavioral question I asked as say tell me a time which something you did outside of your area of responsibility and why you choose that and what was the impact right so in that case I want to look into the person if uh you are seeing some problem with the customer are you taking the proactive approach uh to solve that or you are saying hey this is not my job okay and uh uh so uh and that's how we able to raise the bar on daily basis right so suppose even though if you are working on the day-to-day project so so uh suppose you are application development architect okay and then or take your network architect the better example and you are configuring the network uh different layer of network you are putting the VPC if I will take the AWS concept or you are designing the Lan or van on on simple term and network firewall and all but if you will see that there is a issue with the you see that security posture is missing there is a security vulnerability is there right you are you ready to take that kind of initiative say that hey this is uh this is even though my outside of my area of doen but I should do something about it right and did you build some initiative where you say that his security is first and after that and it should be embed everywhere that not in the networking but application and all those things right so so this is one of the example and um I I expect everyone to take the additional uh responsibility jump into the things when and get your sleeves up when you see the problem rather than saying that it's not my job yeah that that's a great question uh personally when I interview a lot of essays I always like to ask them for an example of how they contributed back to their essay organization outside of a iCal business sales cycle so maybe they contributed back uh some best practices or wrote a program that other essays can can use and become more efficient with so I like to look for for those things a huge part of that uh interview cycle is the systems design interview could you give us an overview of what that entails and also uh some examples of questions you might get on a systems design interview yeah so the system design interview for the solution architect it it will not be at the code level right we are not asking you to write the pseudo code or put some code in C++ Java or any rust or any other language but it's more about U how you are thinking about the overall architecture right so uh if I will take a example uh one of the system design example if I will take suppose uh if you want to build the e-commerce website right and I give the e-commerce example because everyone can relate to it everyone people are doing shopping in amazon.

com right it is a big e-commerce website and all okay so people can relate to it so how you are going to design that website right and uh there you have the millions of transaction uh and U we it can scale it to the billions of them okay so when system design questions will come and these kind of questions is come I will say that don't always jump into the answer right ask some probing question and that that is the solution architect job to clarify the requirement sometimes I intensely ask the question without giving the much information and I ask expect person to ask the probbing question from me right if I'm saying oh go and design the three tier or Sol uh e-commerce website I'm expecting them they should ask okay so how much transaction you you are expecting how many users will be there or uh will it be hosted globally or it is uh uh for the some reasons right and uh is are you expecting it to be accessible from the multiple channels right like mobile and desktop and all so at least three four probing question you should always ask right and then if person will say yes it is uh it it will be hosted globally everyone in the world should able to assess it and uh and uh it should have the 100,000 user or 1 million user then your CH your answer change drastically from One requirement to other if I will say it is hosted in one reason versus globally it change drastically if I will say it is 100,000 user to 1 billion user you CH your answer change it okay so you make sure you ask that question and once you go on the designing think about the business requirement before jumping into the three tier architecture what is the business requirement here business requirement is uh user want to come and they want to First log in right so you want to have the secure authentication and open authentication then they want to see the product catalog and product catalog can have lots of image and videos on that so if your website is hosted in us and someone ising from the Australia how fast they will able to download because there will be lots of network latency right then there will be add to cart feature where people is placing two order they are adding in the cart how you encourage them to do the checkout and do the shopping rather abandoning the cart that is the big problem right so you focus on that and then and then how they smoothly they can make the payment what different pay in payment module what different method I am providing then how fast I can shape how it is integrated with all other system because as soon as order get placed it need to go into the warehouse management the warehouse uh and then warehouse management uh need to have the transportation life cycle management it need to pack ship and then in all these steps you need to give the update back to the user so if anytime they are clicking they see here where is their package and what stage it is uh how I can facilitate the easy return option so think about all the different feature and then say that uh uh these are the different feature I will think but I will dive deep on the couple of feature right so let's dive deep on the uh first think the user authentication because security is important and second is the order management placing the order and then you go into the architecture right so if I'm going taking the order management example now I'm going into the architecture so first is I will talk in top layer I will talk about the age location okay so where I can cach my static content video and image so anyone can download immediately right even though my website hosted in us but my static content setting someone in somewhere in Sydney and Melbourne where Australian user can download so there is no latency on that right the second is you will also talk about how you are going to protect it from the DDS attack from the you will put the web application firewall okay so make sure that uh it is not get uh and then uh you will only expose the when traffic will come like these millions of user is coming you only expose the load balance of there everything will be in the private subnet so no one can crack to it then you are going in the second is uh your web layer we are talking about the user authentication application layer where you have all the business logic someone is placing the order you need to calculate the tax you need to calculate the money process the payment and send it to the to the order uh to the warehouse management system now if you also need to think about and then you have the database where you are hosting everything then you talk think after that move to the NFR NFR is your talk about how you the non-functional requirement will satisfy so first things is uh think about how I will scale today my user is 1 million suddenly in Thanksgiving it went to 10 million will my website will scale to 10 million or it will start doing error out so then it scaling come in the database scaling and application scaling application layer you can have the auto scaling whether it is you are doing in container or you are doing the server apply the auto scaling there and uh I'm not going Lots of details because this is the long answer but giving you high level in database think about uh uh separating out the read replica from the main database and uh or also think about can you use the no SQL database right for session management for the product catalog and all those things offload or can you sh your database because if there is uh uh based on the key you can multiple segment of the database right so these are the things in terms of the scalability you can thought High availability do customer really want uh active active uh or they really want the active P scenario then you want to have the disaster recovery and the security at every layer so all these different things need to think about when answering the system design question that makes sense and I like what you said about kind of starting start starting big picture you're asking these probing questions and and then identifying these Key properties of your system but then only going deep on a few of them since obviously there's a time limit you can't go deep on everything but I think that's that's fantastic advice I wanted to ask about a a type of interview that I've actually seen quite a lot uh we we do it at tekon and also previous companies that I've worked for have done this where we ask the candidate to make a presentation they either present they present uh another product that they've sold before or they do a demo of some arbitrary software um is there anything like that at AWS uh or have you have you kind of seen this with other people who are interviewing for essays essay roles um and yeah what what kind of guidance can you give for that yeah presentation I will see is the key part of the essay role right this is day in day out they need to do and uh I have put a a very broad advice and very deep advice in in book also is both whiteboarding and presentation right so first I will go to the presentation address your question and then we'll go to the white boarding also so presentation is uh my advice on the present a is think always think about your presenting to the cxos first right and uh don't put lot so lots of slide and busy slides there right if you are presenting to the cios and cosos they have very less time right their time is very valuable and uh don't get into urge of giving all the details right okay so might be I will suggest let's put eight 10 slides and talk about the business value first right and explain the Persona what Persona you are presenting even if nobody has asked okay so first Persona you should start with the CI Persona who want to suppose cloudy move the entire workload in the cloud how it is going to help and they mostly care about uh how it is going to improve their team productivity how it is going to improve the cost for them right reduce the cost for them uh without sacrificing the customer experience and performance so take that angle and then you can put might be one slide for the director of engineering or Chief Architect right and just stop there Rest Detail you can put in appendex right so if you are presenting to the people you should have uh some standard is there if there is 45 minute presentation the rule is uh you should not have more than uh 15 20 slide 15 slide I would say Okay maximum one slide should not take more than 2 minute you don't want to put lots of text because the the whole idea about slide is you give some visual but you will have lots of talking points and uh then you also uh uh and then you leave the time for question and answer right so if there is 45 minute time 30 minute should be reserved for the presentation 15 minute for the Q&A and those 30 minute 20 slide uh means if you are taking like 10 slide per slide 2 minute 20 minute gone there right and then introduction and all so keep it very crisp and again talk about the what is the takeaway from that presentation right if they go out of the room at the end uh what they think do we have the clear action item first and what is the key takeaway CLE and call to action we normally call it right and uh normally I ask people suppose you got 30 minute time and you just got a 5 minute because of some sudden happen how you convey your idea in five minute so what normally presentation happen is people try to get lots of details and then they keep the summary at at the end right but what happen you run out of the time and the key part all the mey part get left out I will say don't put the suspense executive don't like suspense put first what are the you are going to explain and if they have to drop after five or 10 minute they also understand they get the key meet there okay so my advice is opposite first to go into the uh into the summary part see what they are going to get and uh and why and then how part can you can explain later that that's a great tip and do do you think that translates as well to customer facing presentations should we kind of frontload that summary and and put it all in the 5 minutes so that you know if they leave so yes yes I will say uh that resonate to everywhere in customer facing also because what happened in presentation people get bored after 15 minute and they lose the attention so the highest time span of attention is First 5 to 10 minute and whatever key message you want to convey use that time and if they get buying in those 5 to 10 minute they are going to stay throughout otherwise they'll say I not getting what this person is trying to say and everyone start checking their laptop and mobile and it will go off the rail awesome so you also mentioned in the AWS interview cycle there's the hiring manager interview towards the end of that could you tell me what that entails and what is the hiring manager asking that the other people have not already asked hm yes so normally hiring manager always look as uh how this person is uh is the team fit and uh how this person is going to work with the my customer and stockholders because hiring manager is always in leadership position and they are working with the multiple team members on the across the Horizon right multiple teams right and uh then they are also working a lot with the leadership right providing the updates to them and all those things so they always look how this person can not only work within the team but also this person can work across the team and how well he he articulate the things which help and how crisp he can put which help to provide the leadership update also right so I will say it is more about the team fit and uh that could be mix of the things there could be a thing some few things about the how that person is going to earn trust right and if that person is taking the ownership of their action and not especially not throwing others under the bus okay that is that is most important and some behavioral question comes into that uh uh suppose one question I can ask is uh tell me a time when uh your goal depend upon the other team's goals and how you align that right and the simple things is suppose you are building a data Lake right data Lake maybe building the data lake is top goal for you and you want to get it out on the way but uh then you need to go to the the finance team and you want data from them our inventory management team want data from them our inventory management that is not top goal that is on the bottom of the list right so how you help them and they might be busy more or managing the inventory soft there packing picking and shipping so how you align the goal there right how you make sure your things happen what action did you take take there right uh when if you have to take the escalation path how you go about it okay and especially that is the tricky situation because uh you should always take the buying from the P team and create the joint strategy when going in front of the management rather than going and saying that hey I'm not getting this from here right so those kind of things is lots of the things which talk about the team f right so the these are the one question and I can think of some more questions are there where we see that hey you missed the deadline right and uh that deadline you miss because of the some team members are not available are able to not do delivery then how you tackle that situation right how you presented that situation so these are some tough question but these are the very important question to have a right team player yeah that's that's a pretty tough question um I'm I'm curious like I actually have not been asked that before uh and I haven't been in a situation where like a team just dropped the ball on it what what do you think the best approach to that problem is and and like yeah as if you're being asked this on an interview I'd love to hear your answer yeah mean the best approach is uh always uh where you see the ball is getting dropped understand why it is happening because no one do it intensely there is some problem there right because overall everyone here to get the work and get paid right the understand what is the problem the problem may be actually there is there may be the problem they don't have the data right or they are waiting for something or they are thinking they don't have bandwidth because they are so slam with the other priority right so can you go there and can you help them to do the things right if they are saying hey I have the table but I don't have anyone to bring the to pull the data and give the dump to you is your team has the bandwidth because that your primary kpi say that hey could you if you can provide me the temporary asss I can do the job for you right or I can help you to automate something or if if that is not happening then actually you need to solve their problem in order to earn their trust and so if they are running the bandwidth you can say that hey I'm going to help you let's make a business skate and say that hey I need some more resources in the team so that I can also work on these critical things so actually in this process why you are helping you are solving your problem before that you are helping the other people problem so I will say the best way to build the trust and U build the collaboration to understand what other person goal is and make their goal your goal right and try to help them and they will automatically help you and that things goes long way even after a year if you need something you will go them they will never say no right you'll always get it so that that's the joural humanly ADV I GI for the people awesome so we've we've covered a handful of example questions today given people some strategies uh what other what other guidance can you give people as they prepare for these interviews uh any any parting words so one things uh I think we have not addressed is um lots of uh new College pass out is asking hey how I can get into the solution architect carrier okay because these are the area where you see lots of experienced people are sitting so my advice is uh is uh first of all try to the try to find the PATH which can lead to you there okay so even there is handful job where you can get into the solution architect uh job day one like AWS as the Tech University carrier uh Tech University program where it's called Tech Q where you can get into the if you get selected you get into techq Academy six month program and do that but uh in that case also we expect if you are the college pass out and coming to there the other path is you get into the support engineer role right and from there you get a good handson and then you can move into the architect path or you get into even software development and uh then you can move after a couple of years you can move to that but beginning of your my advice is to don't B down with presentation and xlc do as much as handson you can do even if you you are doing the job where as a one year twoe experience you are doing presentation and Excel seat it is going to backfire okay if not then tomorrow you will have nothing okay so do as much as handson you can do that is the in even though so even today I build the lots of pocs and prototyping okay even though talking to lots of Executives in my current role but still I stay in touch with the technology and that is the reason I start writing the book Because as getting the experience getting into the leadership role kind of you start Lo losing touch there and the best way to teach best way to learn is to teach others right and that's what when I'm writing the book I'm learning a lot I'm experimenting a lot and I'm trying like how I present to the people so that they can understand in very simplified manner putting the tech things in simplified manner is is little challenging so you have to do lots of research so so College aspirent I will definitely say that they should there is different venue and they should stay in touch with the technology and eventually they will get into the path and um yeah I will say we whatever we talked about I always love to helping the people and U and that's what to scale myself I have packaged that into multiple Tech talks and books and everywhere so you are always welcome to explore that and um and you can follow me in LinkedIn and be in touch H that that's great advice I know there a lot of college students graduating into this market right now and trying to figure out what their next steps look like um I know when when I was fresh out of college I did not know that I would go down the path of solutions architecture uh my my first job was actually more of a a sales engineering role which was less focused on the overall system uh maybe a little more sales Focus uh but it actually gave me an opportunity to get my hands dirty and actually build systems and be in the game and then I worked on some other skills to become an essay so I definitely agree with uh with a lot of what you said and also interesting that everybody comes from a different path there's no clear correct path into Solutions architecture it seems like people come from such a wide variety of backgrounds with the last few minutes we have um maybe you could just tell us uh how how it has been writing those books of yours and also I'm curious how you find the time to do it all yeah I think uh it's uh required lots of discipline and uh one things uh and lots of practice right so the success or comes with the hard work and practice and it's the less from the luck most from the how disciplined you are and how intentional you are so for me actually yes all the books is like 500 600 pages and every time even I'm revising the book it's I'm kind of rewriting everything and uh I uh mostly I don't watch much TV so my TV time and is almost none means still I watch it's like but it's just I limit to 30 minute per day right and then Sunday Kind of I put on the writing so everywhere like after food I put one hour thinking doing some research thinking about what should be the outline and all and then with years of practice now I can write very fast so Sunday I just sit down like four five hours in one go and and finish the chapter right and one book it take good time because uh because of as you said this is full-time job with family and with so many responsibilities I normally put 9 to 12 month time so we have the in between we have vacation we have the family plans and also kind of try to balance everything and uh if we'll do simple math in one week you have the 168 hours and then if you are putting like to 40 40 hour in the job 40 to 45 hours typically you can still if you target I will take almost four to six hours to follow my passion whether it is writing the book whether it is sports or anything else or learning the code and all after year it will make big difference right and that is the power of like Atomic habits if you know the book right and uh reading it easy but uh yeah it takes some time to to bring into the discipline and when I'm writing about these topics these are very broad topic like in my recent Ed latest edition of ESS handbook you see I dived up a lot on the generative and machine learning while in my previous Edition I put a lot on the quantum Computing and iot so whatever this trend we have to put that and yeah and if you will see the interview solution solution Arch interview book it talk about the 10 different roles of the solution archet and each role dive deep onto how to do the whiteboarding for that role how to do the presentation and what different question can ask how you can answer those question it's kind of a full interview guide is there yeah so I will say to everyone if you want to follow your passion just get into the discipline some lean on some of the time might be social media and uh uh social media and TV time might be would need to cut down not eliminate and just think about where I can get four to six hours in a week and uh sex will follow you you'll see the difference thank you for for that it's great great life advice um thanks everyone for tuning in today uh as as mentioned before sarab wrote the solutions architect interview which is available today it goes Super in depth way more in depth than this video on actual questions that you'll be asked on an interview so we definitely recommend that uh that you check that out awesome uh SAR it was great talking to you and thanks for joining us today thank you Nick thanks for having me [Music]