You’re staring at a stack of résumés for a Cloud Architect role — but in today’s market where the cloud skills gap is real, how can you tell if someone really can build secure, resilient, cost-efficient cloud systems or is simply talking the talk? With organisations facing up to a $5.5 trillion hit due to IT skills shortages by 2026, you can’t afford a hire who falters on day one. TechTarget This article gives you 30 carefully selected interview questions to assess true cloud architecture mastery, plus pointers for hiring managers who may not be deep-technical, and how the platform Scaletwice can help you screen smarter, faster, and with more confidence.Table of ContentsWhy ask 30 questions?What you should evaluate in a Cloud Architect candidateTechnical category questions (10)Design & architecture questions (10)Behavioural and culture questions (5)Cost, operations and governance questions (5)How to score and interpret responsesHow Scaletwice can streamline pre-screeningKey TakeawaysWhy These 30 questions?The cloud architecture domain spans infrastructure, security, cost-optimization, deployment, scalability and more. A single or handful of questions won’t reveal deep mastery.According to research, 60% of organisations report a cloud computing talent shortage in 2025. pelanor.io That means you’ll likely be choosing from a less than ideal pool – you must dig deeper.A robust set of questions helps surface not only what the candidate knows, but how they think and apply knowledge — exactly the difference between someone who can maintain cloud services and someone who can architect them.What you should evaluate in a Cloud Architect candidateWhen you meet a candidate, beyond checking boxes, make sure they demonstrate:Platform-agnostic depth – Can they talk AWS, Azure, GCP scenarios, hybrid clouds, and know when to pick which?Security and compliance awareness – Given cloud misconfigurations cause security incidents, you need someone who proactively anticipates risks.Cost optimisation mindset – Cloud isn’t “lift and shift”. There’s significant waste if one doesn’t optimise.Scalability and resilience thinking – They should think about failure, recovery, high availability.Communication & stakeholder skills – They must translate technical risks into business terms.“The implications of a skills gap for businesses can be severe … restricted growth and business innovation.” – Damon Garn, TechTarget TechTargetReadiness to be measured – Look for real examples, metrics, prior accountability (not just buzzwords).Technical category questions (10)Use these to probe fundamentals, platforms and concrete experiences.“Explain the difference between IaaS, PaaS and SaaS, and give an example of when you chose one over the others.” usebraintrust.com“Describe how you designed a fault-tolerant cloud architecture, including fail-over, redundancy, and cross-region strategies.”“How have you implemented serverless architecture in a previous project, and what trade-offs did you face?”“Walk me through how you ensured data security and compliance in the cloud (encryption at rest/in transit, identity and access management, audit logs).” usebraintrust.com“What’s your process for migrating an on-premises application to the cloud? How did you minimise downtime and risk?”“How do you connect on-premises applications to cloud services (e.g., VPN, Direct Connect, hybrid models)?” Indeed“Which cloud networking services (VPC, subnets, gateways, NAT, peering) have you configured and why?”“Describe a case where you did rightsizing or cost-optimisation of cloud workloads. What were the savings and how did you measure it?”“How do you monitor and measure cloud performance, identify bottlenecks and optimise?”“What is IaC (Infrastructure as Code) and how have you used Terraform/Ansible/CloudFormation in your cloud architecture design?”Design & architecture questions (10)These dig into architecture decisions, trade-offs and real world constraints.“Describe a cloud solution you worked on end-to-end: from requirements gathering, design, implementation, to post-go-live optimisation.”“How do you design for high availability and disaster recovery in the cloud? Give an example of your RTO/RPO decisions.”“How do you assess whether to choose multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, or single-provider cloud architecture?”“Explain micro-services architecture in a cloud context, and how you handle service-mesh, networking, and API gateways.” usebraintrust.com“How do you handle stateful vs stateless services in the cloud?”“What are the major architectural trade-offs when designing for eventual consistency vs strong consistency in cloud systems?”“How have you incorporated cost of ownership, licensing, operational overhead into your cloud architecture design?”“What process do you use to identify and reduce cloud vendor lock-in?”“How would you architect an application for rapid scale-down (i.e., you have peak traffic, then idle periods) and how do you optimise cost?”“Tell us about a time where your architecture failed or under-performed. What happened? How did you recover and what did you learn?”Behavioural and culture questions (5)This section ensures fit, mindset and communication – just as important as cloud skills.“Describe how you partnered with non-IT stakeholders (e.g., business leaders, finance) to align cloud architecture decisions with business goals.”“How do you stay up to date with cloud technologies, services and certifications?”“Tell me about a time when you had to advocate for an architectural decision others opposed – what was your approach?”“How do you manage conflicts or disagreements within a cloud engineering team when architectural directions differ?”“What cloud governance or standard-setting initiatives did you lead or contribute to in your previous role?”Cost, operations and governance questions (5)These flip the lens to ongoing operations and governance – a common weakness in cloud hires.“How do you monitor and control cloud costs? What tools or processes have you used (e.g., budget alerts, FinOps, tagging)?”“Describe how you implemented a cloud governance framework: policies, tagging, identity & access, compliance controls, architecture review boards.”“What is your strategy for cloud backup, snapshot management, and data retention policies in a cost-efficient way?”“How do you optimise under-utilised resources, orphaned volumes, or unused services in live cloud environments?”“Explain how you built or contributed to a cloud incident response/playbook for cloud outages, and how you ran a post-mortem or RCA after.”How to score and interpret responsesUse a scoring rubric (e.g., 1 = weak/no example, 3 = good example with metrics, 5 = excellent with specific impact and reflection).Look for metrics and outcomes: “we reduced cut-over time by 75%” or “saved $X per month by rightsizing” is gold.Beware “buzzword bingo”: generic answers without project names, timeline, stakeholders, results.Assess learning mindset: Did they fail somewhere? What did they learn? Architecture evolves fast.If you’re a non-technical hiring manager, ask for a candidate to explain a concept to you simply (e.g., what high availability means to executives). Their ability to communicate is key.How Scaletwice can streamline pre-screeningHiring managers like you are under pressure: more candidates than jobs, fewer fully qualified cloud architects, and decision-making bottlenecks in pre-screening. That’s where Scaletwice comes in.Scaletwice gives access to a community of candidates who’ve passed mock interviews in exam-style format, meaning you can see recorded interview excerpts of their responses, demonstrating proactivity.Candidates upload video links of their asynchronous responses — you watch later, while non-technical hiring managers still get AI-feedback summaries of their video answers (for example: clarity of explanation, use of metrics, confidence).You can bulk-screen many candidates via the platform, invite top-scorers for deeper rounds — saving you time and cognitive load.Scaletwice also supports contractor/out-staffing sourcing: if you don’t want a full-time hire, you can find contractors officially employed by Scaletwice, ready to plug in.By integrating this into your workflow you can focus your live interviews on the 20–30% best-scoring candidates, rather than spending time evaluating everyone.If you’re frustrated by endless screening, ambiguous resumes, and cloudy cloud-skill assertions — Scaletwice offers a faster, more efficient route.Key TakeawaysThe cloud skills shortage is real — you must ask deep, scenario-based questions to separate strong candidates.Cover technical, architectural, behavioural and governance dimensions with about 30 questions across categories.Use a scoring rubric, insist on metrics, avoid generic buzzwords, and test communication skills.Leverage tools like Scaletwice’s pre-screening community and asynchronous interview library to speed up hiring.Your next step? Take your job spec and integrate 5–10 of these questions now, then run candidates through Scaletwice to identify the strongest finalists.Ready to optimise your hiring and access pre-screened cloud architecture talent? Explore scaletwice.com.
