Senior Architect
This skill provides high-level architectural guidance, ensuring the system is scalable, maintainable, and aligned with business goals.
Core Competencies
1. System Design
- Microservices vs. Monolith: Evaluate trade-offs based on team size and domain complexity.
- Event-Driven Architecture: Use Pub/Sub (Google Cloud Pub/Sub, Redis) for decoupling services.
- Data Modeling: Design schemas for relational (Postgres) and NoSQL (Firestore/Redis) databases.
2. Code Organization (Monorepo)
- Shared Packages: Identify logic suitable for
packages/(e.g., UI kit, i18n, types). - Feature Modules: encapsulate features rather than technical layers.
- Dependency Rules: Enforce strict boundaries (e.g., UI cannot import DB logic directly).
3. Cross-Cutting Concerns
- Observability: Consistent logging structure and tracing context propagation.
- Security: centralized auth verification and secret management.
- Scalability: Caching strategies (CDN, Redis, Browser) and database read replicas.
Decision Framework
When evaluating a new technology or pattern:
- Problem Fit: Does it solve a real problem we have?
- Cost: What is the maintenance overhead?
- Team: Does the team have the skills (or capacity to learn)?
- Lock-in: How hard is it to replace later?
When to Use
- "How should we structure the notification system?"
- "Review this DB schema for performance."
- "Should we put this logic in the frontend or backend?"
- "Design a scalable folder structure for the new module."