The Solutions Architect Interview Loop

Most SA interview loops have at least four rounds (including the initial HR/Recruiter screening call.) Depending on company size, industry, and the degree of specialization required, some companies might have more rounds depending on the skills they want to test in detail.

The interviews that you can expect to face in a SA interview loop are:

Recruiter Screen

If you’re an outside hire, you’ll likely begin with a high-level call with a recruiter. These last 30-45 minutes and include:

• Behavioral questions to assess your experience, personality, and working style.
• Experiential questions to understand your background and skill set.
• Light technical questions to assess your technical depth.

Good questions to ask at this stage are:

• What’s the format of the interview? Will I be asked mostly behavioral questions? Will I be expected to go through a technical exercise?
• Can you please provide the names and any relevant background for my interviewers so that I can prepare?

Some tips on acing the first interview:

• Do research on the company so that you can display why you’re interested and how you can contribute.
• If it’s by phone, have all of your prep materials physically laid out in front of you for easy viewing. If it’s by video, it’s better to keep your prep materials on your computer so that you can make eye contact often with the video camera.
• If you can, look up the interviewer on LinkedIn so you can understand them a bit better; make references during the interview if you have something in common.

Hiring Manager Screen

Next is a 30 – 60 minute conversation with the hiring manager. You’ll be asked about your experience (both technical and customer-facing) so it’s important to highlight not just your technical skills, but also how you have gone above and beyond to ensure a happy outcome for customers and related stakeholders. If you are applying for a Senior SA role, you’ll also be asked about your experience working with sales teams, such as account executives.

Tip: Remember, this is your opportunity to interview the hiring manager. Try to get a sense of the exact nature of the role, including the challenges faced by the team and how the manager plans to solve them. This will help you decide if the company and team are right for you.

Here are some tips for making the most out of this round.

• Ask the hiring manager how they develop and mentors reportees. They should be able to share one or two success stories of reportees being promoted.
• Ask about quotas. Typically, 20%, 30%, or even 35% of the total compensation of an SA is based on commission from deals they've closed. To set expectations for SAs, the company sets a quota, or a dollar amount that an SA is expected to achieve during a quarter/year. We recommend asking about the quota achievement of team members. Ideally, it should be very close to or above 100%. If multiple team members are not able to achieve quotas, it might mean that the product is not a great market-fit.
• Get a sense of the specific challenges faced by the team. Make sure you leave the conversation with a sense of how the hiring manager plans to solve them. Commn challenges include onboarding new members quickly, establishing guidelines for interacting between SAs and account executives, and ensuring high visibility of the team within the organization.
• Ask about the growth path for SAs. Typically, the growth path is SA->Senior SA-> Principal SA. The first step typically takes 1-2 years, and the second step takes between 2-4 years depending on the company. Ask about the most important things the hiring manager looks for when considering someone for the next level.

Technical Screen or Peer Interview

Depending on the company, you may have a conversation with the counterpart of your manager from another team, or a technical discussion with some of your potential team members. The conversation goes a bit more in-depth about your experience and aims to uncover how you work with customers, and what are your unique strengths and weaknesses both technically and when working with customers.

This is an opportunity for you to know more about the team you would potentially be joining from a neutral third party.

Tip: A particularly important question to ask here is: “What does this team do well? What could be improved?” The interviewer should have insights that your hiring manager might not have. Learning about the pain points encountered when other teams interact with your team gives you a solid list of things to improve once you eventually join the team and maximize your impact within the first few weeks/months.

Panel Interview

This is the most important round. You'll typically face about a half-days worth of interviews, including more technical and behavioral rounds, but the most important interview by far will assess how you interact with customers. Since this is such an important interview, we've dedicated a whole module to prepping for customer interaction interviews later on.

Customer interaction interviews fall into a few predictable categories. You’ll be either given a use case at the start of the interview or a few days prior, and be asked to present the use case as if you are presenting to a potential customer, or you'll be given a challenge during the interview.

• If given a use-case, you’re generally expected to develop working solution(s) and present them to the panel, considering the current challenges being faced by the customer. You'll likely be expected to demo your solution and handle some customer objections.
• If given a challenge during the interview itself, you are expected to whiteboard a solution and explain to the customer how your product can solve their challenges.

In both cases, you are expected to refine the requirements given by the customer and map these business requirements to the technical capabilities of the product.

Some companies might ask you to treat this conversation like a discovery call. In that case, your focus won’t be on the product solution. Instead, you’ll be expected to deep dive into the customer’s requirements. Your goal is to uncover all useful information and hidden motivations from the customers. We’ll prep you for each of these interview types in later lessons.

Here are some tips for acing the panel interview.

• Ask about the most important challenges customers face. This might be security, product availability on a particular cloud, or the absence of a particular feature. You can dig deeper into if the organization is proactively listening to customer feedback and trying to improve the product.
• Ask about what the product does well in relation to competitors, and what is the defining factor in the company winning/losing deals. This information would also allow you to do an independent evaluation of whether the product is a leader in its space, or whether it is just one of many.

Depending on the company, you may get one or more of these rounds as well.

In-depth Technical Interview

Depending on the company and how technical they expect their SAs to be, you may face a technical interview with another SA or even an engineer.

For example, a cloud vendor might deep-dive into your experience of working on cloud storage systems, whereas a data engineering company might deep-dive into your knowledge of building scalable, resilient, and secure data pipelines and operating them at scale.

Tip: Typically, SAs are not expected to be hands-on except for short POCs (proof-of-concept). If an organization wants to check your technical skills such as coding for an SA role, ask whether SAs are expected to perform complex POCs. If yes, evaluate if this is what you want to do, since a lot of SAs enter this field because they do not want to be hands-on coding most of the time.

Culture Fit Interview

While behavioral questions are a part of almost all interviews, some companies might have a specific culture-fit interview to validate if you are good for the company’s culture.

You might be asked to deep-dive into your experience working with the sales team, challenges faced while working with account executives, strategies to ensure time management when working with several AEs/clients and instances of how you have gone above and beyond for customers.

Tips for acing culture fit rounds include:

-It’s an unfortunate truth that there’s typically some friction between account executives and SAs. This is because SAs, primarily being technical resources, service many customers while account executives usually don’t. Sometimes, SAs are under huge pressure from AEs to jump on last-minute calls or take on more customers than they are comfortable with. Ask how the company deals with this tension and whether guidelines for engaging with SAs are clearly defined.

• Ask about the general work-life culture. Typically, an SA’s week consists of 30-40% customer meetings, 20-30% preparing for these customer meetings, with the rest mentoring, working on documentation, and supporting internal teams. You may want to ask what a typical week looks like for SAs in this organization and what resources/support are available if an SA feels overwhelmed with customers or the level of complexity within the product.

Executive Interview

Some companies expect candidates to have a conversation with their “skip-level” manager (your manager’s manager.) This is often a director or a VP. This interview is a unique opportunity to learn about the long-term vision and direction of the company, current challenges faced by the pre-sales organization and the company in general, and how the company plans to solve them.

You can expect questions on your long-term vision for your careers and what drives you. It is always good to research the company, challenges it is currently facing, new products the company is planning to launch, etc. before this conversation - it shows that you’re invested in the big picture as well.

Some questions you may want to ask:

• What is the vision of the company? What are the new products the company plans to launch in the near future?
• Who are the biggest competitors for the company and how does the company plan to become the leader in the space it operates in?
• How do you (and your peers) support and nurture the SA team, and help them become more visible within the organization?