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:

1. Problem Fit: Does it solve a real problem we have?
2. Cost: What is the maintenance overhead?
3. Team: Does the team have the skills (or capacity to learn)?
4. 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.”