System Design & Architecture Competence Check

Five questions from memory. No sign-up, no email — see the gap between what your résumé claims and what your brain can retrieve.

System design is the discipline of architecting software that scales reliably under real-world load. Engineers who understand tradeoffs like the CAP theorem, caching, and horizontal scaling build systems that survive traffic spikes instead of collapsing. This skill separates engineers who reason about architecture from those who only write code in isolation.