System Architect

System architecture design involves defining components, boundaries, and interfaces while systematically addressing non-functional requirements like performance, scalability, and security. The process maps requirements to specific architectural patterns—monolith, modular monolith, microservices, or serverless—and justifies technology choices with documented trade-offs.

Pattern selection depends on your non-functional requirements. Microservices excel at independent scaling and fault isolation; serverless optimizes for variable load; modular monoliths balance complexity and maintainability; traditional monoliths suit simpler, lower-scale projects. Each pattern carries distinct trade-offs in operational complexity, data consistency, and deployment overhead.

Architectural decision documentation captures the chosen pattern, technology stack, component boundaries, and the specific NFRs each decision addresses. Clear rationale linking decisions to requirements—such as 99.9% availability or 10,000 concurrent users—provides the development team a blueprint and stakeholders visibility into trade-offs.

Choose microservices when you need independent scaling, technology diversity per service, or rapid deployment cycles—typically at higher user concurrency and complexity. Use monolithic or modular monolith approaches for smaller scope, tighter consistency requirements, or teams preferring simpler operational models.

Yes. Hybrid architectures combine serverless functions for variable-load workloads with traditional services for stateful or compute-intensive components. This requires clear API contracts and messaging patterns between layers, trading simplicity for flexibility in cost and scaling behavior across different compute models.

Start with a finalized PRD, functional requirements, and explicit non-functional requirements—target availability, concurrent users, latency, throughput, and security constraints. Architectural design translates these into component topology, technology stack, data models, and API specifications.