The short answer: solutions architect interviews test whether you can turn business requirements into a sound technical design and explain it to both engineers and executives. Expect requirements-gathering and architecture design questions (scalability, availability, disaster recovery, data, security, cost), migration scenarios, customer scenarios (“Your design is too expensive”), and behavioral questions. A useful structure for any design answer is the set of pillars both major clouds publish: AWS’s Well-Architected Framework names six (operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization and sustainability), and Microsoft’s Azure Well-Architected Framework names five (reliability, security, cost optimization, operational excellence and performance efficiency).
Interviewing for an AWS role? Our AWS interview questions cover the services and trade-offs in depth, and our microservices interview questions cover distributed design.
Sample answers are illustrations, not quotes from real candidates.
Two kinds of solutions architect
- Customer-facing (pre-sales) solutions architects at cloud and software vendors help customers design solutions on the vendor’s platform. Interviews emphasize customer conversations, whiteboarding and presenting.
- Enterprise solutions architects design systems inside a company, balancing business needs, existing systems and standards. Interviews emphasize trade-offs, integration and governance.
Most loops include a technical screen, a design whiteboard session, often a presentation or customer role play, and behavioral interviews (for example, Amazon’s Leadership Principles at AWS; see our Amazon Leadership Principles guide).
Requirements questions
“A customer says, ‘We want to move to the cloud.’ What do you ask first?”
“Why now, and what does success look like: lower cost, faster releases, scaling for growth, or closing a data center by a date? Then the constraints: compliance and data residency, budget, timeline, skills on their team, and which applications matter most. I’d also ask about current pain points and what they’ve already tried.”
“How do you separate functional from non-functional requirements?”
Functional requirements describe what the system does (users can place orders). Non-functional requirements describe how well: availability targets, latency, throughput, security, compliance, cost and recovery objectives. Most architecture decisions are driven by the non-functional ones, so pin them down with numbers.
Design questions
“Design a scalable, highly available web application.”
- Clarify: expected users and peak traffic, read/write ratio, latency target, availability target, data size, regions.
- High-level design: a content delivery network for static content, a load balancer across instances or containers in at least two availability zones, stateless application servers with autoscaling, a managed relational database with a standby replica in another zone, a cache for hot reads, and object storage for files.
- Scale and resilience: read replicas and caching for read-heavy loads, queues to absorb spikes and decouple slow work, health checks and automatic replacement of failed instances.
- Security: least-privilege access, private subnets for data, encryption in transit and at rest, a web application firewall, secrets in a managed vault.
- Operations and cost: monitoring and alerts on user-facing metrics, infrastructure as code, right-sizing and autoscaling to avoid paying for idle capacity.
- Trade-offs: say what you’d change at ten times the traffic, or with a tighter budget.
“What’s the difference between high availability and disaster recovery?”
High availability keeps a system running through component failures, usually within a region (multiple zones, redundancy, failover). Disaster recovery restores service after a major event such as a regional outage or data corruption. Define RTO (how long you can be down) and RPO (how much data you can lose), then choose a strategy: backup and restore (cheapest, slowest), pilot light, warm standby, or multi-region active-active (fastest, most expensive).
“SQL or NoSQL?”
Relational databases for structured data, transactions and complex queries; NoSQL (key-value, document, wide-column) for flexible schemas, very high scale or simple access patterns. Many systems use both. Base the choice on access patterns and consistency needs, not fashion.
“When would you use microservices?”
When independent teams need to deploy separately and parts of the system scale differently. They add operational complexity (networking, observability, data consistency), so a well-structured monolith is often the right starting point.
“How do you design for event-driven processing?”
Producers publish events to a queue or stream, consumers process them independently, and failures go to a dead-letter queue for retry. Make consumers idempotent, because messages can be delivered more than once.
Migration questions
“How would you plan a migration of 200 applications?”
Discover and inventory applications and dependencies, group them, and choose a strategy per application: retire, keep as is, rehost (“lift and shift”), replatform (small changes such as a managed database), or refactor (redesign for cloud-native services). Migrate in waves, starting with lower-risk applications to build the team’s skills, with a tested rollback plan for each wave.
Security and cost questions
- “How do you secure a cloud architecture?” Identity first (least privilege, multi-factor authentication, no long-lived keys), network segmentation, encryption, logging and monitoring, and automated checks for misconfigurations. See our security architect interview questions.
- “How do you reduce cloud costs?” Right-size resources, use autoscaling, buy commitments for steady workloads, use cheaper storage tiers for old data, shut down idle environments, and make costs visible to the teams that create them. See our FinOps interview questions.
Customer scenario questions
“The customer says your design is too expensive.”
“I’d first ask what budget they had in mind and which requirements matter most. Then I’d show the cost drivers and offer options: for example, a warm standby instead of active-active if a one-hour recovery time is acceptable, or reserved capacity for steady workloads. The goal is a design they can afford that still meets the requirements they truly need, with the trade-offs written down.”
“Explain your architecture to the CFO in two minutes.”
Lead with the business outcome (faster launches, lower risk of outages), the cost and how it scales with usage, the main risk and how it’s handled, and the decision you need from them. No acronyms.
Behavioral questions
- “Tell me about a design decision you got wrong and how you fixed it.”
- “Tell me about a time you disagreed with an engineering team about an architecture.”
- “Tell me about a time you had to say no to a customer or a senior stakeholder.”
- “Describe a complex solution you explained to a non-technical audience.”
Related guides: system design interviews, sales engineer interview questions and technical program manager interview questions.
Frequently asked questions
What questions are asked in a solutions architect interview?
What are the pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework?
What is the difference between RTO and RPO?
How do I answer a system design question as a solutions architect?
What is the difference between a solutions architect and a sales engineer?
Sources
- Amazon Web Services, The pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework. Read on 1 October 2026.
- Microsoft Learn, Azure Well-Architected Framework pillars. Read on 1 October 2026.
