Solutions Architect Interview Handbook

The Solutions Architect Interviews Handbook covers more than cloud service knowledge. You have to gather requirements, defend trade-offs, and explain a design to engineers and customers in the same conversation. Memorizing what each service does won’t carry you through that. This course prepares you for each round. I built this course based on my years at Microsoft building cloud infrastructure and my experience co-founding Educative and leading its engineering since 2015. In both roles, the hard part was never naming the right service. It was deciding what the system should do under load, during failure, and within a budget, then explaining why. That is what a solutions architect interview tests, and I’ve seen strong engineers struggle when they jump to components before pinning down the requirements. You’ll learn to lead the interview from the start by defining requirements, stating assumptions, and drawing a baseline diagram. You’ll evaluate design quality using the Well-Architected Framework, trace a request through DNS and ingress, and choose compute services using a cross-cloud mapping of AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. You’ll then design state, delivery, and resilience patterns and strengthen them for security and recovery. The course closes with cost and migration discussions and behavioral answers, with AI mock interviews along the way to help you practice defending a design out loud. Whether you’re moving into a solutions architect role or targeting a senior cloud position, this course teaches you to lead design discussions and justify every component you put on the diagram.