From Senior to Staff Engineer
The architecture judgment that gets you promoted. Trade-off axes, capacity models, data stores, service boundaries, distributed failure, and reliability, reasoned from first principles and defended out loud.
$1,500 live cohort$299 self-paced, same curriculum
Full refund if the first module doesn't change how you design.
About This Course
Writing the code stopped being the hard part. Deciding what to build, defending the call, and being the person others follow is what separates senior from staff.
Every promotion course sells soft skills and every engineering course sells AI tooling. Almost nobody teaches the hard technical skill that actually gets a senior engineer promoted, which is architectural judgment. This course sits in that gap: the outcome of a promotion course, the substance of an engineering one.
Ninety-one lessons across nine modules, each one axis or one decision, plus worked designs and the projects that turn them into written artifacts you can put in front of a promotion committee.
This is the self-paced version of the live cohort. Written lessons, diagrams, cheat sheets, and worked designs teach the method; the cohort ($1,500) adds live review of your work. Self-paced is $299 for the same curriculum, on your own schedule.
Try before you buy: the opening lessons plus one core trade-off lesson are free to preview. And if you work through the first module and the reasoning isn't changing how you design, email me for a full refund.
Course Curriculum
10 modules · free lessons open to everyone
$1,500 live cohort · same curriculum, self-paced
Full refund if the first module doesn't change how you design.
What You'll Learn
- Start Here
- The 6 Core Trade-offs
- Capacity Estimation
- Choosing a Data Store
- Data at Scale
- APIs and Networking
- Distributed Systems
- Architecture and Domain Design
- Reliability and Operability
- Capstone: Worked System Designs
What Cohort 1 said
The self-paced course is the same curriculum engineers went through in the live cohort. Here's what they took away.
The workshop was excellent preparation for system design interviews. It goes beyond typical Senior-level content by focusing on the strategic thinking, trade-offs, and clear communication expected at the Staff level. The practical frameworks and real-world examples helped me structure ambiguous problems more effectively and justify my design decisions with confidence. Highly recommended for any Senior engineer looking to level up.
I really enjoyed this class. Ehsan is incredibly friendly and open to discussion, creating a great environment where everyone feels welcome to participate. His deep expertise in complex systems and software engineering principles made this course incredibly useful. I have nothing but great things to say. If you want to master complex system design, this is the course to take!
The combination of live sessions, practical exercises, and real-world examples made the material directly applicable to design reviews, interviews, and day-to-day engineering work. I especially appreciated how the course connected technical architecture skills with the communication and decision-making expected at Staff level. I would highly recommend this course to senior engineers who want to strengthen their system design skills, lead architecture discussions more effectively, and prepare for the next stage of their careers.
Ready to level up?
120 lessons across 10 modules. Start with the free module, then unlock the rest.