1. Business Understanding advanced

    A food-delivery marketplace takes a 12% commission on an average order of 400 rupees, and its contribution after paying delivery partners and payment fees is about 15 rupees per order. The platform team proposes a design that costs 3 rupees per order in infrastructure. Is that acceptable, and what does the answer change about the architecture?

    3 min answer unit-economicscost-per-requestmarginfinops
  2. Estimation advanced Multiple choice

    Your capacity plan sizes the platform at twice last year's peak. Ticketmaster's November 2022 Eras Tour onsale took 3.5 billion system requests - four times its previous peak - after inviting 1.5 million verified fans. Which assumption inside a peak-multiple estimate fails first?

    3 min answer ticketmastercapacity-planningestimationpeak-load
  3. Ethics in Architecture advanced

    A product's growth team wants account deletion to take 30 days of "cooling off", during which the account is recoverable and the user receives win-back emails. The architecture already implements this as a soft-delete flag. What happens when the first erasure request arrives citing a legal right, and what should have been designed differently?

    3 min answer erasuregdprdark-patternsretention
  4. Ethics in Architecture advanced

    An architect is asked to implement something technically straightforward that they believe is harmful to users. What is the professional response?

    2 min answer zerodhaethicsdark-patternsprofessional
  5. Ethics in Architecture advanced

    What ethical questions belong in an architecture review, and who should raise them?

    2 min answer ethicsprivacyminimisationaccessibility
  6. Ethics in Architecture advanced

    Which architectural decisions carry ethical consequences, and what is the architect's professional responsibility?

    2 min answer ethicsdata-minimisationaccessibilitytransparency
  7. Failure Thinking advanced

    Between August and early September 2025 three separate infrastructure bugs degraded Claude's output quality - one affected 16% of Sonnet 4 requests in the worst hour of 31 August - while error rates and latency stayed normal. What class of failure is this, and what would you have had to build beforehand to notice it?

    2 min answer anthropicsilent-failuredetectionquality-regression
  8. Failure Thinking advanced

    What does it mean to design by thinking about failure first, and what does that produce that requirement-driven design does not?

    2 min answer credfailure-modesdesignpremortem
  9. Failure Thinking advanced

    What does it mean to think in failure modes as a habit rather than as a checklist item, and which questions consistently produce findings?

    3 min answer failure-modesdesign-reviewresiliencequestions
  10. Failure Thinking advanced

    What questions characterise failure thinking, and which are most often skipped in design reviews?

    2 min answer failure-thinkingreviewdependenciesdegradation
  11. First-Principles Reasoning advanced

    A team says 200 ms is the minimum achievable latency for an operation. How would you check?

    2 min answer first-principleslatencyassumptionsphysics
  12. First-Principles Reasoning advanced

    When is first-principles reasoning the right tool for an architect, and when is it a waste of time?

    2 min answer first-principlesphysicsassumptionsjudgement