- You can design systems with explicit trade-offs (security, reliability, cost, delivery speed).
- You can operate what you design (monitor, debug, recover, reduce MTTR).
- You can communicate decisions (diagrams + ADRs + risks/options) across product/engineering/platform.
- Identity & Access (Entra ID): Managed Identity, RBAC scope, Key Vault posture, app-to-app auth.
- Networking (integration depth): Private endpoints vs public, DNS story, VNet integration, egress constraints.
- Reliability & Operations: SLOs/error budgets, HA/DR thinking, observability, incident readiness.
- Data Integration: messaging/events, contracts, versioning, replay strategy.
- Service boundaries: bounded contexts, ownership, data ownership.
- Consistency & workflows: aggregates/invariants, domain events, sagas/process managers, CQRS (selective).
- Integration boundary protection: Anti-Corruption Layer (ACL), context mapping.
- Resilience patterns: idempotency, outbox, retries/backoff, circuit breaker, DLQ/poison handling.
Deliverable: a personal “SA playbook” with decision rules (when/why) for each.
Create one opinionated baseline you can reuse and explain.
- C4 diagrams: Context → Container → Component
- Baseline blocks: ingress, auth, API design, data stores, messaging, caching, observability
- Non-functional checklist: security, reliability, latency, RPO/RTO, cost guardrails
- ADRs template: context → options → decision → consequences
Deliverable: one reusable reference architecture + ADR templates.
Implement one portfolio-grade system (Recap Insights or a clean sample) that forces real decisions.
- Event ingestion (webhook or simulated)
- Queue/topic + worker pattern
- Idempotency + retry/backoff + DLQ/poison handling
- Outbox pattern (reliable publish) when DB + events coexist
- Event contracts + versioning strategy
- Observability: logs + traces + metrics + dashboards
- Define bounded contexts + ownership (even if kept as a modular monolith initially)
- Identify aggregates/invariants and where you allow eventual consistency
- Add workflow only when needed: Saga/Process Manager
- Add CQRS only when read/write needs truly diverge
Deliverable: working system + failure-mode story + traceable flows + ADR pack.
You don’t become the networking team—you become “integration correct.”
- Private endpoint + DNS resolution story (split-horizon reasoning)
- Service-to-service connectivity patterns (PaaS + VNet integration limits)
- Egress control implications (allowlists, NAT/firewall posture)
- Ingress high-level choices (Front Door vs App Gateway/WAF posture)
Deliverable: “Connectivity & DNS” diagram + 1–2 ADRs showing correct reasoning.
You don’t need to run DevOps; you must design deployable, operable systems.
- IaC literacy (read/review/modify Bicep/Terraform)
- Deployment strategies (slots/canary/blue-green/rollback)
- Configuration & secrets strategy (Key Vault, managed identity, feature flags)
- Cost guardrails (budgets/alerts; major cost drivers)
Deliverable: CI/CD + IaC in your project + cost/ops notes.
For each real platform (sanitized) + your project:
- C4 diagrams + context map (bounded contexts and integrations)
- ADRs (8–15):
- microservices vs modular monolith (and why)
- sync vs async boundaries
- data ownership & consistency decisions
- outbox/idempotency strategy
- saga/process manager choice (or why not)
- storage choice & cost drivers
- observability + SLO posture
- security posture (authn/z, secrets)
- Reliability pack: SLO + alerting + incident playbook snippet
- Integration pack: event contracts, versioning, consumer expectations
Deliverable: an “Architecture Portfolio” (repo or doc set) that backs every resume bullet.
Focus areas with highest SA ROI:
- RBAC/governance (policy/locks/tags)
- App connectivity + private endpoints/DNS basics
- Azure Monitor logs/metrics/alerts
- App Service/compute configuration + scaling
- Storage security + lifecycle
- identity/governance/monitoring design
- data storage design
- business continuity design
- infrastructure solutions design (including connectivity decisions)
Deliverable: certifications + standardized architecture language.
Create 8–12 STAR stories across:
- architecture decisions + trade-offs (why this, why not that)
- microservices decomposition / bounded contexts / data boundaries
- reliability incidents + MTTR reduction
- cost reduction / performance improvements
- cross-team influence (product/platform/security/devops)
- modernization/migrations (strangler approach, incremental rollout)
Deliverable: a brag doc that maps directly to your resume.
Use one consistent structure:
- requirements + constraints + assumptions
- domain decomposition → bounded contexts → ownership
- data boundaries + consistency model (strong vs eventual)
- sync vs async communication (and why)
- failure modes + resilience patterns (outbox/idempotency/retries/DLQ)
- observability + SLOs + ops plan
- security + networking posture (integration-correct)
- cost drivers + scaling plan
- explicit trade-offs and risks
Deliverable: 10–15 rehearsed prompts with written solutions.
- handling ambiguity / missing requirements
- influencing without authority
- decision logs (ADRs) + conflict resolution
- alignment with platform/security teams
- pragmatic trade-offs under constraints
Deliverable: 6–8 “leadership moments” with measurable outcomes.
- Present your role as “Principal Engineer (Acting Solution Architect)”
- Quantify outcomes: availability, cost, latency, delivery cadence, risk reduction
- Link portfolio artifacts: diagrams + ADRs + project
Deliverable: a one-page resume with evidence links for key claims.
- Maintain and evolve your reference architecture quarterly.
- Keep ADRs for high-impact decisions (don’t let decisions live in heads).
- Add one production-grade capability at a time (security, observability, DR, cost guardrails).
- Practice 1 architecture prompt/week using your method.
Result: you stay interview-ready while becoming stronger in real SA execution.