As someone else says, it depends on what you define as a "software architect". A co-worker from a former company that was a "technical fellow" and "technical di

As someone else says, it depends on what you define as a "software architect". A co-worker from a former company that was a "technical fellow" and "technical director" (effectively an architect, at a 12,000 person tech company), came over to Google and just has the title of "Software Engineer". From the companies I've worked at, software architect covers a lot of different job descriptions. At Google, more senior software engineers will have a "system design" type question as part of their interview. There are sample problems for this all over the internet[0]. For example, you could ask them "Design a URL shortening service like bit.ly.". When you ask open ended questions like these, there are so many parts of the system you can dive into that you can really test the depth and breadth of a candidate's knowledge. [0] https://www.hiredintech.com/system-design/ https://www.hiredintech.com/system-design/