Review an existing architecture for risks
Company: Amazon
Role: Software Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Onsite
## Architecture Review Prompt
You are given an **existing production system** (described verbally by the interviewer). Perform a design/architecture review.
### Questions to answer
1. What parts are likely to **fail or hit limits within 6 months** (scale, reliability, operability, security)?
2. What appears to be **over-engineered** or unnecessarily complex?
3. If **headcount cannot increase**, what changes would you propose to improve reliability, scalability, and on-call load?
### Expectations
- Ask clarifying questions (traffic, data size, SLOs, failure history).
- Provide prioritized recommendations and trade-offs, not a rewrite-from-scratch.
Quick Answer: This question evaluates an engineer's ability to perform an architecture review, identifying imminent scalability, reliability, operability, and security risks and prioritizing pragmatic trade-offs under fixed headcount constraints, and is commonly asked to assess risk analysis, operational judgment, and communication about production systems.
