How to Get a Solutions Architect Job (with AWS Solutions Architect) | Interview Tips and Process

[Music] hey everyone i'm stephen here with exponent and i'm super excited to be interviewing saurabh about solutions architect roles today we're going to be talking about how to get a solutions architect role and how to succeed in the interview first sarah can you introduce yourself for those watching hi everyone and hash tv nice to have me and this is saurabh srivastava and i am a solution architect leader with amazon web services and working with aws since six and a half years based off the theater awesome and uh sorry i've just written a new book and we'll be talking about that a little bit more throughout this video so sara i want to start off this interview by talking about the solutions engineer solutions architect who's currently interviewing for a role so you can imagine our viewers someone who is interviewing for a company like aws and they're nervous about how to get the job i want to first talk about that recruiting journey and if you have any tips or advice for someone who is talking to a recruiter or applying to the role before they get into the interview stage okay yeah so since the cloud comes into the picture this solution architect role become very prominent earlier you you it used to be the business architect role and people used to do togaf and all those things but now with all the different cloud provider amazon web services is one of the leader on that but then you have the microsoft azure or gcp or alibaba any cloud providers so when this recruiting journey is start first you need to look at the job description and what they are looking for even though most of the time they they want to have some kind of the public cloud skills you need to have so i will recommend if you are not working in the public cloud and it's fine to have the good knowledge into the on prem on premise environment but let's get some basic certification so like aws if you'll get the cloud practitioner certification or associate solution architect certification that make your case stronger for to get selected for the interview even though certification is not guaranteed that you are champion on that but it says that hey at least you know something and you are disciplined enough to learn okay and then that say that you are going to be learning be curious in ramp up period you can do better so i will say that should be the first things look at the job description what is the demand there because in cloud also there are different kind of solution architect role it could be the security focus it could be the data focus or machine learning focus or enterprise application focus and it could be journalist role also okay so look at the job description modify your uh make sure you accommodate all the required skill and resume and then go for the application and get the basic certification that i will summarize that makes sense and um i think there's a lot of good value and you know a lot of candidates need to look at job descriptions to know how to interview effectively because there's always different aspects to them well one thing that comes up a lot is like do you need a certification to succeed i know you're saying a certification doesn't guarantee it but for those watching like would you how strongly would you recommend getting that certification before going through that application process yes so what happened there is a lot of people in the market okay so there is a lot of job also but there is still a lot of demand for the good skills people so when hiring manager go and screening through the resume they always see if you have some kind of certification then you get through the you have higher chances of getting the call okay so that that is the so i see it still has the value to get yourself front in the line however it hiring manager will not assume that you have the certification so you are going to get hired but at least you get chance to get the call and have interview and get the face time with the recruiting team got it that's super helpful um so let's imagine now you know we've gotten through we've gotten that call tell me about the call tell me about the interview process and what that looks like for those watching so i can talk about the amazon interview process how it works into the aws and pretty much if you prepare for this i can i can say that you can track any interview okay it's pretty regress process now but uh it is a very good journey a learning experience so first things uh when you onboard into the interview process there will be a first phone screening interview and there might be some written exercise okay but most of the time from screening interview and they took the phone screen and they they check if you are the person to whom we should call on site aws should call on site and because we are going to spend five round of interview means it is five hours of time and this uh and this is lots of time investment from both parties from the inter viewer side and interview side also so we want to make sure that we get the right candidate there so these 60 minute or 90 minute phone screening process i evaluate if you are good in good knowledge or take depth and take breadth into the solution architecture if you have that and also if you satisfy the basic leadership principle so like amazon have 16 leadership principle and some critical leadership principles are like customer obsession untrust learn and be curious so just to validate the basic things okay and once you able to crack the phone screening by proving yourself right you have some you have the good breadth of the technical knowledge and you have one area of depth means we are not expecting everyone to be champion in all the area right so someone and know the data very well someone know the security very well but we also expect you if you can go 400 deep into the data security or container you also have the basic knowledge of all other things also okay the basic networking or basic databases and all those things uh so that so that kind of skill set required from tech prospective leadership principle is all about learning from your experience okay so uh it's about whatever you have learned in your experience just put that in star format okay so like a situation task action and result and that things will help you a lot to move forward to all the process so suppose when you are reaching into the on-site process where there will be five rounds of the interview and each interview will be a discussion because there will be no hypothetical situation there will be mostly a behavioral question okay tell me a time when you solve the customer problem right so you can go and talk about in star format talk about the situation this uh this particular incidence when customer was in that he wanted particular feature and what action you took to gather the customer feedback and what task you do you might have created some architecture and all and what was the result will it deploy to the customer side and what was the performance improvement or this it addressed the customer satisfaction rating so all those data backed decision need to be there and all of the interviews based on that behavioral things only because we want to learn from your experience what you have learned in years of experience and if it is for the new grant like college higher and all those things even though they don't have much experience in rusty experience then also we ask we try to learn what you have gained might be during your graduation through your college project and what basic skills you have gone you have got to satisfy the leadership principle which are the critical for the role yeah that's really great advice and one thing yeah definitely unique about amazon is these leadership principles and it's important to know those beforehand one question i i guess that sometimes comes up is it okay to reuse the same example for different leadership principles um you know any tips about those specific leadership principles interviews yeah so that's a very good question because one question can qualify across multiple leadership principles okay so if you're talking about the customer obsession that can be qualified for bias for action also when you took immediate action to solve the customer problem right so i will say when any person is coming for the interview i advise them if you have five round interview at least prepare eight to ten examples okay or minimum seven eight examples it's fine to repeat the examples but don't repeat the same example across four or five interval you can repeat for two interval okay so suppose if you have seven or eight example you can repeat it across two different interviewer but don't take it for a cross four all four um and then i i'd be curious though you know these are the amazon leadership principles what what other kinds of interview questions come up or what other things do you think people need to be prepared for in that interview cycle so one critical things i will say so i talked about the star format okay so situation task action and result but uh you need to go into the deep into whatever example you are saying so suppose if you are coming into the task part and say i build the architecture where it was containerizing the application from the monolithic to microservice now be ready to dive deep into what is the restful architecture what is the circuit breaker pattern how you handle the edge cases like when downstream system is down and your system is not crashing entirely and what kind of container you use whether it is docker or kubernetes if kubernetes then how kubernetes is working okay so whatever example you are giving make sure that you are able to have that you are able to dive deep on that that is first from technical perspective and the second is how you are scaling the things so suppose you have built this solution you deployed in one customer can you package it into a full-fledged platform or product and deployed it across other customer also could you make it rinse and repeat scalability is very important right so once you come to the result then also make sure that you give a thought how to scale it then ask three question to yourself okay what was the challenges any project you are doing in real time you will have some challenges right so what was the challenges you faced and how you solved them the second is what was the success criteria did you baseline in what key performance indicator are there where i can going to measure the success so suppose earlier page load time was the 10 second am i is my performance success should be like five second or three second load time right so and that or i need to increase the customer acquisition so earlier there was one million users was using the website and now i'm able to dive 1.5 million so 50 percent growth there so the key performance indicator should be there and third is what was lesson learned if you need to do the same things today if you want to re-architect the same what differently you will do so ask these three question also after preparing your example and that will set you for the success that's really helpful advice that's super awesome is there anything else that you think would be helpful to know for folks who are interviewing for solutions architect roles either at aws or other companies yeah so solution architect role is very natural so it's not about uh just a tactic right this person also need to be very good in the soft skill present in terms of the cxos okay so ceo cios and the solution architect role start taking the enterprise land escape and convincing the key stakeholders also get the buy-in are you going to fund this okay and then take that once getting the buying from the executor then go and work with the engineer and tell them how it is going to implement so soft skill is very important and the most important things is you need to always be learning so whenever i look any solution architect i make sure and i wanted to know how enthusiastic is in learning because entire organization is depend upon your architect you are building the foundation and you are going to provide the choice with technology use to use on which which is not and if you are not continuously learning every six month new technology is coming so at least in your domain you should be aware what is the right fit and what is not like and one way to do that always do the hands-on and like building some prototyping so if i get like some new technology i said okay let's put a quick prototype on that a proof of concept and see if it is really working or not so show and tell model rapid prototyping continuously learning and having those soft skills to convince the executive and convert the requirement to the at engineering level is very important totally this is all super helpful startup like um you know i want to be mindful of the time but is there anything else that you want to add or anything else that you you think would be helpful this has been really helpful for people who are interviewing for roles so see i'm in this field since a long time so and often people ask me this question okay how to get succeed in this role and how to so that is the reason i wrote the book the solution architect handbook okay so i will show you this is the book i wrote and this is the second edition so first edition launched in 2020 and it was pretty good at options so i wrote the second edition also and expanded some more horizon and this book whatever i have talked about everything i put there so that it will help people to understand what is the solution architectural and how to go about it and what the different expectation in the industry including from technical part to the conceptual to soft skills also so i will say if you are looking into the more detail just uh they take that is your bible the solution i'll take hannibal awesome and we'll include a link in uh the page below as well um but before we close i just wanted to say thank you sarah this is super helpful hope this is helpful for folks watching um and for folks watching if you don't already know about exponent um you can check us out at tryexponent.com we help people land their dream tech job in roles like solution architect roles and we have interview courses for roles in solution architect as well as pm tpm engineering management and more um thanks once again sarah it was great to have you on the show okay thank you thanks for having me thanks so much for watching don't forget to hit the like and subscribe buttons below to let us know that this video is valuable for you and of course check out hundreds more videos just like this at tri-exponent dot com thanks for watching and good luck on your upcoming interview [Music]

Channel: Exponent

Views: 31,276

Keywords: yt:cc=on

Id: AGdb7SNGOXo

Length: 16min 16sec (976 seconds)

Published: Tue May 31 2022