Catalog / ARCH-200
ARCH-200SpecialistSystem Design & Architecture
Distributed systems, event-driven patterns, and scalability - taught as decisions to defend, not diagrams to memorize.
About this program
Architecture interviews and review boards test the same skill: reasoning about trade-offs under constraints. This program builds that skill deliberately. Participants work through distributed-systems fundamentals, event-driven and data architecture patterns, and scalability engineering, then practice communicating designs the way senior architects are expected to: options first, trade-offs explicit, decision defensible.
Who this is for
- Senior engineers preparing for architect roles or design-heavy interviews
- Architects who want stronger distributed-systems fundamentals
- Tech leads accountable for system-level design quality
What you will be able to do
- Reason precisely about consistency, availability, and partition trade-offs
- Select messaging and event-driven patterns with clear failure-mode analysis
- Design data architectures that scale without painting the team into corners
- Present and defend designs in architecture-review and interview settings
Program modules
Delivered over 6 weeks of live tutor-led sessions, applied work, and structured review.
Architecture thinking
- Quality attributes: naming what the system must actually do
- Constraints, assumptions, and the shape of good design questions
- Architecture styles: monolith, modular monolith, microservices, serverless
- The cost of distribution: when not to distribute
Distributed systems fundamentals
- Consistency models in practice: what applications really need
- Partitioning, replication, and the failure modes they introduce
- Consensus, leader election, and coordination costs
- Idempotency, retries, and exactly-once mythology
Event-driven and messaging patterns
- Queues, streams, and pub/sub: selection criteria
- Event sourcing and CQRS: power and price
- Ordering, delivery guarantees, and poison-message handling
- Choreography versus orchestration in workflows
Data architecture at scale
- Polyglot persistence: choosing stores by access pattern
- Sharding and partitioning strategies and their operational cost
- Caching architecture: layers, invalidation, and coherence
- Analytical versus transactional paths and keeping them honest
Scalability and resilience engineering
- Load modelling and capacity reasoning from first principles
- Backpressure, rate limiting, and graceful degradation
- Resilience patterns: bulkheads, circuit breakers, timeouts
- Performance engineering: finding the real bottleneck
Communicating architecture
- Architecture decision records and design documents that get read
- Diagramming with intent: views for different audiences
- Running and surviving architecture reviews
- Capstone: full system design defended under structured critique
Hands-on components
- Weekly design exercises reviewed live in cohort
- Failure-analysis workshops on real-world architecture case studies
- Capstone system design defended in a mock review board
Ready to apply?
Apply any time. Admissions reviews your fit, confirms the next available cohort, and issues an invoice. Your seat is confirmed on payment.