How to Defend Any System Design Decision in 6 Questions

Hosted by Ehsan Gazar

Wed, Apr 29, 2026

6:00 PM UTC (30 minutes)

Virtual (Zoom)

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From Senior to Staff: Master the Architecture Skills That Get You Promoted
Ehsan Gazar
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What you'll learn

Evaluate any system design decision in 30 minutes

Name the top 3 trade-offs, state what each gains and loses, and make a written recommendation — on the spot

Write an ADR a VP can read without engineering context

Produce a one-page Architecture Decision Record that a non-technical stakeholder can follow and act on.

Run a back-of-envelope capacity estimate from scratch

Calculate users, requests/sec, storage, and bandwidth — and    use the numbers to find where a design breaks.

Choose the right database and defend it with trade-offs

Pick between relational, document, key-value, or specialist stores and give a real recommendation, not "it depends."

Match architectural style to team size and product stage

Identify whether monolith, microservices, or event-driven fits this context, and explain why the alternatives are worse

Why this topic matters

Most senior engineers are blocked not by what they know — but by what they can't articulate. They make good design decisions intuitively, but can't document the reasoning, lead the review, or defend the trade-offs to a VP. That gap is exactly what keeps people at Senior. Architecture isn't a knowledge test. It's a communication and decision-making discipline — and it's learnable.

You'll learn from

Ehsan Gazar

Principal Engineer, 500+ mentees, 16 years in production

I'm a Principal Engineer with 16 years of experience building and scaling production systems across fintech, SaaS, and enterprise software. I've made hundreds of real architectural decisions in systems that had to survive real traffic, incidents, and org politics.

I've run 500+ mentorship sessions with senior engineers at a 5.0 rating, helping them close the gap between writing code and thinking at the architectural level. I've also taught 10,000+ students and distilled what separates engineers who get promoted from those who stay stuck.

I'm not an academic. Every framework here comes from real decisions or mistakes I had to recover from. I’ll teach you to think like a Principal Engineer: not “what’s the right answer,” but “what are the trade-offs, and what survives contact with reality.”

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