Hiring Tech Leads and Solution Architects: How to Assess Architecture Skills
A wrong senior developer hire usually costs you a few months. A wrong architect can cost you years. The decisions they make, about how systems are split, where data lives and which technologies the company depends on, are the most expensive ones to undo.
Yet many companies interview tech leads and architects the same way they interview senior developers: a coding task, a generic “design a URL shortener” question and a chat about past projects. That tells you whether someone can draw boxes on a whiteboard. It doesn’t tell you whether they can make sound decisions under pressure, explain them to the business and get several teams to follow them.
This guide gives you a practical way to assess architecture skills, from the first screening call to the final interview, plus what to know about hiring these roles in Belarus.
Get the role right first
“Tech lead”, “software architect” and “solution architect” are often used interchangeably, but they’re different jobs. Many failed hires start with a vague job description. And if what you really need is a head of engineering or a CTO, you’re looking at executive search rather than an architect hire.
| Role | Main focus | Typical scope | What they produce |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tech lead | Delivery and code quality | One team | Working software, code reviews, technical decisions within the team |
| Software architect | Internal structure of systems | Several teams or a platform | Service architecture, standards, technical roadmap |
| Solution architect | Matching technology to business needs | A project, product or client solution | Solution designs, integrations, estimates, trade-off analysis |
Before you write the vacancy, list the problems this person will own in their first 6–12 months. Do you need someone to split a monolith, to design integrations for a new client, or to keep a team of eight shipping without the codebase falling apart? The answer decides which role you’re hiring for and which skills you should test.
The skills that actually matter
Martin Fowler sums up software architecture as being about “the important stuff, whatever that is”. Your interview process should find out whether a candidate can recognize the important stuff and handle it well. Here’s what to look for.
Trade-off thinking
Every architecture decision gives something up. Strong candidates explain not only what they chose but what they rejected and why. They talk about cost, complexity, speed of delivery and risk. Weak candidates describe their solution as if it had no downsides.
Non-functional requirements
Features are rarely what breaks a system. Scale, reliability, security, cost and observability are. Good architects ask about these early. A useful checklist is the AWS Well-Architected Framework, which groups them into operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization and sustainability. You don’t need AWS to use it as a mental model.
Clear documentation
Architecture that lives only in someone’s head doesn’t scale. Look for people who write down decisions and draw diagrams other people can follow. Ask how they document their work, and whether they use formats such as architecture decision records or a structured diagramming approach.
Communication with non-engineers
A solution architect who can’t explain a design to a product owner or a CFO will struggle, no matter how good the design is. The best candidates can translate technical choices into time, money and risk.
Pragmatism
Experienced architects usually prefer proven, “boring” technology unless there’s a good reason to do otherwise. They know when good enough is the right answer and when it isn’t.
Leading without authority
Architects rarely manage the teams that implement their designs. They need to persuade, set standards and get buy-in across teams. Ask for examples of how they got other teams to adopt a decision they didn’t control.
For tech leads: mentoring and balance
Tech leads also need to grow people, review code constructively and balance delivery deadlines against technical debt. Watch how they talk about juniors and about trade-offs between speed and quality.
Screening: what to check before the interviews
You can filter out a lot of mismatches before anyone spends an hour in a design session.
On the CV, look for systems the candidate owned end to end, real numbers about scale (users, requests per second, data volume, team size), migrations they led and incidents they handled. These are signs of someone who has lived with the consequences of their decisions.
Be cautious with CVs that list 40 technologies, describe “participation in architecture” without any decision of their own, or include only greenfield projects. Building something new is valuable, but running it for three years teaches you far more.
Two screening questions work well for almost any candidate:
- “Tell me about an architecture decision you’d make differently today.”
- “What did your last system cost to run, and how did you know?”
Strong candidates answer both with specifics. Weak ones struggle to name a mistake or have never thought about cost. If you don’t have time to run screening calls yourself, a recruiter who specializes in hiring tech leads can do it for you.
Interview exercises that work
No single exercise reveals everything. A good loop combines two or three of the following.
Walk through a past system
Ask the candidate to draw a system they built or significantly shaped, then dig in. Why this database? What failed in production? What would they change now? How did the system evolve? This is the most revealing exercise, because it’s very hard to fake detailed knowledge of a real system.
If the candidate uses the C4 model or a similar approach, you’ll quickly see whether they can move between levels: from the big picture down to containers and components, and back.
A realistic design case from your domain
Skip “design Twitter”. Use a simplified version of a problem your company actually has, with real constraints: a budget, a team of five, a legacy system that can’t be replaced this year, and a deadline. Pay close attention to the first ten minutes. Strong candidates ask questions and clarify requirements before they draw anything.
Change the requirements halfway
Midway through the design case, change something important. Traffic grows ten times, a regulator requires data to stay in one country, or the budget is cut in half. This shows how the candidate adapts and whether their design was flexible in the first place.
Review an existing design
Give the candidate a short design document or decision record with a few deliberate flaws and ask for a critique. You’ll learn how they spot risks and how they give feedback. A classic format is the architecture decision record described by Michael Nygard, with its context, decision, status and consequences sections.
A stakeholder conversation
Ask the candidate to explain a design choice to someone playing a product owner or finance director, who cares only about time, cost and risk. This is especially important for solution architects who work with clients.
For tech leads: a code review
Review a real pull request together. Look at what the candidate comments on, how they prioritize issues and the tone they use. Code review style is a good predictor of how someone will lead a team.
Keep take-home tasks short
If you use a take-home task, keep it to two to four hours, or pay for longer work. Senior candidates usually have several options, and many simply refuse long unpaid assignments.
A scorecard for consistent decisions
Without a shared scorecard, interviews turn into a debate about impressions. Use simple criteria and agree in advance what each level looks like.
| Criteria | Weak | Strong |
|---|---|---|
| Requirements | Starts designing straight away | Asks about users, scale, constraints and priorities first |
| Trade-offs | Presents one option as obviously right | Compares options and explains what was given up |
| Non-functional requirements | Mentions them only when asked | Brings up reliability, security and cost unprompted |
| Communication | Relies on jargon | Adapts the explanation to the audience |
| Pragmatism | Chooses fashionable technology by default | Matches complexity to the real problem |
| Leadership | Talks only about their own work | Shows how they influenced and grew others |
| Domain fit | No relevant context | Understands the business problems in your domain |
Score each criterion from 1 to 4. Ask every interviewer to fill in the scorecard on their own before the debrief, so the loudest opinion in the room doesn’t decide the outcome.
Red flags to watch for
Some warning signs come up again and again:
- Technology before problem. The candidate names Kafka or Kubernetes before understanding what the system needs to do.
- No mistakes. They can’t name a single decision they regret or a trade-off that hurt.
- Over-engineering. Microservices, event sourcing and a service mesh for a team of three.
- Blame. Every past failure was someone else’s fault.
- Can’t simplify. They can’t explain their design to a non-technical person in plain words.
One red flag isn’t always a deal-breaker. Several together usually are.
Hiring tech leads and architects in Belarus
Belarus has a senior-heavy engineering market, with many people who have designed and run products for international clients. Most strong tech leads and architects are employed and rarely look at job boards, so direct outreach, referrals and visibility in the local tech community matter more than job ads. Many of them work at Hi-Tech Park companies, which together employ around 60,000 people.
Salaries for these roles are usually discussed as a monthly net amount in US dollars. Pay rises with experience in cloud and high-load systems, domain expertise in areas like fintech or e-commerce, strong English and the size of the team someone has led.
Plan for a longer search than for senior developers. A good architect hire often takes six to ten weeks from brief to accepted offer, mainly because strong candidates take time to reach and usually compare several offers.
If you’re a foreign company without a Belarusian entity, you can still hire directly through an Employer of Record. Our payroll and EOR services cover contracts, payroll and local compliance through our own Hi-Tech Park company. That means your architect is employed under the same regime as many of their peers.
Set your new architect up to succeed
Even a great hire can fail without the right start. In the first 90 days, an architect should mostly listen: review the current systems, talk to teams and stakeholders, and understand the business priorities. After that, ask for a short written assessment and a list of the top three to five technical priorities.
What you don’t want is a full rewrite in month one. If a new architect immediately proposes replacing everything, that’s often a sign they haven’t understood the constraints yet.
For tech leads, the first months are about earning the team’s trust. Pair them with the strongest engineers early, give them a clear area of ownership and agree how much time goes to delivery versus technical improvements. If you’re hiring a lead who will also manage people, the team lead recruitment process looks slightly different, with more focus on people management.
FAQ
A tech lead is responsible for one team’s delivery and code quality. A solution architect designs how technology meets business needs across a project or product, often working with several teams and stakeholders.
Usually three or four: a screening call, a walkthrough of a past system, a design case and a conversation with stakeholders or leadership. More rounds rarely add useful information and slow down the process.
It helps. Architects who stay close to code make more realistic decisions and earn more trust from engineers. They don’t need to write production code every day, but they should be able to read it and build a quick prototype.
No. A generic system design interview shows how someone approaches a problem, but not how they make decisions over time or communicate them. Combine it with a walkthrough of a real system and a stakeholder conversation.
Usually six to ten weeks from brief to accepted offer. Strong candidates are rarely active on job boards, so direct sourcing takes time. To plan your budget, check our IT salary research for Belarus.
Certifications can show baseline knowledge, but they don’t replace real experience. Ask about systems the candidate actually designed and ran, not only about certificates.
How recruitment.by helps
Recruitment.by has been hiring senior engineers and technical leaders in Belarus for more than ten years. We pre-screen candidates for architecture and leadership skills, share salary benchmarks and help you design an interview process that works.
Hiring a tech lead or solution architect? Send us the role and we’ll come back with a shortlist plan.