Architect Production SaaS Systems Like a Principal Engineer
Building a SaaS product is 20% coding and 80% architecture decisions. Get the architecture wrong and you spend months refactoring instead of shipping features. These 50 prompts give you a principal engineer's thinking process for every critical SaaS architecture decision — from database schema to deployment topology.
Each prompt uses tree-of-thought reasoning to explore multiple architectural options, evaluate trade-offs, and recommend the best approach for your specific constraints. Variables like {{scale_target}}, {{team_size}}, {{tech_stack}}, and {{budget}} ensure recommendations match your reality.
What's Inside — 50 Expert Prompts
- System Design Interview Simulator — Designs {{system_type}} (e.g., URL shortener, chat app, payment system) with requirements gathering, capacity estimation, API design, data model, and scaling strategy. Uses chain-of-thought decomposition.
- Microservice Boundary Definer — Analyzes {{monolith_description}} and identifies optimal service boundaries using domain-driven design bounded contexts.
- Database Schema Architect — Designs normalized/denormalized schema for {{domain}} with indexing strategy, query patterns, and migration plan for {{database_type}}.
- API Gateway Pattern Selector — Evaluates gateway patterns (Kong, AWS API Gateway, custom) for {{api_count}} services with rate limiting, auth, and routing configuration.
- OAuth2/SSO Authentication Flow Designer — Implements {{auth_type}} (OAuth2, SAML, OIDC, magic link) for {{application}} with token management, refresh strategies, and session handling.
- Payment Integration Architect — Designs payment flow for {{business_model}} (subscription, usage-based, marketplace) with Stripe/Razorpay integration, webhook handling, and reconciliation.
- Multi-Tenancy Strategy Designer — Evaluates {{isolation_level}} (database-per-tenant, schema-per-tenant, row-level) for {{tenant_count}} tenants with cost, performance, and security trade-offs.
- Caching Architecture Planner — Designs multi-layer cache for {{application}} with TTL strategies, invalidation patterns, cache stampede prevention, and CDN integration.
- Event-Driven Architecture Designer — Creates event sourcing and CQRS architecture for {{domain}} with event schemas, projections, and eventual consistency handling.
- Horizontal Scaling Strategy — Plans scaling from {{current_users}} to {{target_users}} with database sharding, read replicas, CDN optimization, and auto-scaling configuration.
- CI/CD Pipeline Architect — Designs deployment pipeline for {{service_count}} services with build caching, parallel testing, canary deployments, and rollback automation.
- Notification System Designer — Architects multi-channel notification (email, push, SMS, in-app) for {{application}} with preference management, rate limiting, and delivery tracking.
- Search Architecture Planner — Designs search for {{content_type}} using Elasticsearch/Meilisearch with indexing pipeline, relevance tuning, faceted search, and autocomplete.
- File Upload & Storage System — Creates upload architecture for {{file_types}} with chunked uploads, virus scanning, CDN delivery, and storage lifecycle policies.
- Background Job Architecture — Designs async processing for {{job_types}} with priority queues, retry policies, dead letter queues, and monitoring using {{queue_system}}.
Each Prompt Includes
- {{placeholder}} variables for project-specific customization (scale, budget, team size, tech stack)
- Architecture diagrams described in text/mermaid format for easy visualization
- Tree-of-thought evaluation of 3-4 architectural options with trade-off matrices
- Anti-patterns: premature optimization, over-engineering, and scaling traps to avoid
- Chaining: prompts reference each other for building complete system architectures
Who This Is For
- Senior engineers preparing for system design interviews at FAANG/startups
- CTOs and tech leads making architecture decisions for new SaaS products
- Solo founders who need to make the right technical choices from day one
- Backend developers transitioning to architect-level thinking
What Makes This Different
- Covers the COMPLETE SaaS stack — not just one layer but auth, payments, multi-tenancy, scaling, and deployment
- Trade-off matrices for every decision — not opinionated prescriptions but reasoned analysis
- Real-world scale targets — prompts are calibrated for 1K, 10K, 100K, and 1M+ user scenarios
Works With
ChatGPT (GPT-4+), Claude (3.5+), Gemini Pro. Best with Claude for detailed architectural reasoning.
