50 System Architect Practice Questions: Question Bank 2025

An enterprise wants to restrict access to a custom object so that users can only see records they own, unless access is explicitly granted. Which baseline approach should a System Architect recommend?

A global company needs a consistent way to control access to groups of features across multiple business units, while still allowing local admins to assign access. Which solution aligns best with Salesforce best practices?

A program team must migrate configuration changes from development to production with traceability, approvals, and the ability to roll back. Which approach best meets these requirements?

A system must create Salesforce cases from an external website form and route them to the appropriate team. The business wants minimal custom code. Which solution is most appropriate?

A company is integrating an ERP with Salesforce to synchronize Account and Product data. The ERP is the system of record for Products, and Salesforce is the system of record for Accounts. What is the best integration pattern recommendation?

After a new automation release, users report that saving Opportunities intermittently fails with unhandled exceptions during updates from an integration user. What is the most likely architectural root cause to investigate first?

A multinational organization needs a model where regional sales managers can access all records owned by their teams, but managers in one region must not see records from other regions. The organization also needs some shared accounts visible across all regions. What design best fits?

A platform team wants to reduce technical debt and improve maintainability in a large org with frequent changes. Which governance practice is most effective to prevent unmanaged customization and ensure architectural consistency?

A company needs to expose real-time inventory availability from an external system on the Opportunity Product related list. Inventory changes frequently, and storing it in Salesforce would quickly become stale and create high data volume. Which architecture should a System Architect recommend?

An org has multiple downstream systems subscribing to customer updates. The business requires reliable delivery, replayability for up to several days, and the ability to scale event volume without tight coupling to a single consumer. Which Salesforce integration capability best fits these requirements?

An enterprise Salesforce org uses multiple sandboxes and has experienced inconsistent deployments and missing test coverage documentation. The System Architect must recommend a governance approach that improves release reliability and auditability without slowing teams excessively. Which approach should be recommended?

A customer wants to restrict access to a highly sensitive custom object so that only users with a specific permission can see any records, regardless of role hierarchy. Which design best meets this requirement?

A System Architect is assessing the impact of a large data volume on reporting performance. Which feature should be recommended first to improve selectivity and query performance for reports and list views using frequently filtered fields?

A company has a custom Apex integration that performs callouts during record saves and users report intermittent save failures and slow UI response. The integration target occasionally responds slowly. What architecture change best improves user experience while maintaining near real-time integration?

An org uses Platform Events to integrate with an external system. During peak load, the external system cannot keep up and events begin to accumulate. The System Architect must recommend a resilient design that prevents data loss and supports replay after outages. What should be recommended?

A multinational company wants a single global customer profile but must keep certain fields (e.g., national ID) stored only within the EU. They want Salesforce users outside the EU to see the customer record without those restricted fields. Which approach best aligns with data residency and least-privilege access?

A healthcare provider plans to implement record-level access based on patient-care teams that change frequently. The solution must minimize manual administration and support automation when team membership changes. Which sharing design is most appropriate?

An org experiences periodic CPU time limit exceptions in a batch job that updates Accounts and rolls up values to related custom objects. The job uses nested loops and repeated SOQL queries inside loops. What is the best architectural remediation?

A company is consolidating three acquired Salesforce orgs into one. Each org has overlapping customer records with different IDs and inconsistent field definitions. The target architecture requires a single golden customer record with traceability back to source systems and minimal disruption to downstream integrations. Which strategy should the System Architect recommend?

A regulated financial services org must demonstrate that only approved, security-reviewed changes reach production. Emergency fixes are sometimes required. Which governance model best balances compliance and agility?

A global company is moving to a multi-org Salesforce strategy. Leadership wants a consistent definition of core customer data across orgs and a way to reduce duplication of customer records. Which architecture approach best supports this goal?

A project is experiencing frequent production issues due to unmanaged changes and unclear ownership of configuration decisions across several teams. Which governance action should a System Architect recommend first to reduce risk?

An external fulfillment system sends order updates to Salesforce. During peak periods, Salesforce API limits are exceeded and updates fail. The business can tolerate updates being reflected in Salesforce within a few minutes. What is the best architectural approach?

A team plans to store customer consent history and must retain every change for audit. Records must be queryable and reportable in Salesforce without writing code. Which capability best meets the requirement?

A sales organization wants to reorganize account ownership and sharing based on a new regional structure. The change affects multiple profiles, roles, and sharing rules. What should the System Architect recommend to minimize disruption and ensure correct access before going live?

A Salesforce org uses multiple managed packages and customizations. After a deployment, page load time for a key Lightning record page becomes significantly slower. What is the most appropriate first step in an architecture-led performance investigation?

A company needs a scalable way to allow multiple downstream systems to react when opportunities reach 'Closed Won'. They want minimal coupling and the ability to add new subscribers later without changing the publisher logic. Which design best fits?

A security review finds that sensitive fields are hidden via page layouts but still accessible through reports and API. The business requires consistent enforcement across UI, reports, and integrations. What is the correct architectural remediation?

A company plans to implement Salesforce for multiple business units with shared products but different sales processes. They want to avoid extensive branching logic in automation and keep the solution maintainable. Which architecture choice best supports this?

A System Architect is reviewing an integration landscape and notices multiple point-to-point integrations duplicating transformation logic and error handling. The enterprise wants better observability, consistent retries, and easier onboarding of new endpoints. What is the most appropriate architectural recommendation?

A company wants to ensure that only one team can deploy changes to production, while allowing other teams to build in sandboxes. They also need an auditable trail of who approved each release. Which approach best aligns with governance and best practices?

An architect is evaluating why a Lightning record page is slow. The page includes multiple related lists and several custom components. What is the recommended first step to identify the primary performance bottleneck?

A global company has multiple business units in one Salesforce org. They need to prevent users from seeing each other’s Accounts, but allow a small shared services team to access all Accounts. What is the simplest architecture that satisfies this requirement?

A customer needs a system-of-record for product data and wants to synchronize product attributes and pricing to Salesforce for quoting. Updates to products occur in the ERP and must be reflected in Salesforce within minutes. Which integration pattern best fits?

A security review finds that many users have access to objects they never use because profiles were cloned repeatedly over time. The company wants to reduce risk while keeping administration manageable. What is the recommended approach?

An org has a custom object with heavy automation. Users report that saves occasionally fail with unhandled exceptions during peak hours. Debug logs show intermittent row lock errors on parent records. What architectural change most directly reduces row lock contention?

A company wants to standardize how integrations authenticate to Salesforce across multiple external systems. They need a scalable approach that avoids storing user credentials and supports token revocation. Which solution is most appropriate?

A Salesforce org is integrated with an order management system. Orders are created in Salesforce and must be sent to the external system. If the external system is down, the company cannot lose orders and needs automatic retry without user intervention. What design best meets the requirement?

Multiple teams develop on the same Salesforce org. Conflicts and regressions occur because developers frequently overwrite each other’s changes. Which governance practice most effectively reduces collisions and improves release quality?

A regulated company must ensure that customer data is retained for 7 years, but also must prevent users from deleting records that are under legal hold. They need an approach that supports reporting on retained data and controlled purge processes. What is the best architectural approach?

An enterprise has 20 Salesforce orgs supporting different business units. Leadership wants consistent security posture, naming standards, and release readiness checks before any change reaches production. What is the MOST appropriate governance approach?

A solution must store highly sensitive values (e.g., national IDs) and allow only a small set of users to view the full value. Most users should see masked data and the value must be protected even from direct database access. Which capability best meets this requirement?

An architect is reviewing a new data model and wants to identify whether the design will cause ownership and sharing behavior that differs from standard objects. Which relationship choice MOST directly impacts record ownership behavior?

A global manufacturer must provide a unified customer profile across Sales Cloud and a separate customer service platform. The service platform requires near-real-time updates when key customer attributes change in Salesforce, and the integration must handle spikes during daytime hours. Which architecture is MOST appropriate?

A company plans to implement a complex approval process with multiple dynamic approvers based on product line, region, and deal size. Administrators need to modify routing without deployments, and the solution must be auditable. What is the BEST approach?

A health services organization wants to reduce user access to production data while still enabling developers to test integrations and data-dependent logic. The organization also needs to comply with internal data handling standards. What is the MOST appropriate approach?

A company uses Salesforce as the system of engagement and an ERP as the system of record for orders. Salesforce users need to see order status and line items in near real time, but Salesforce should not store all historical order data due to volume. What is the BEST design pattern?

After enabling an integration to upsert Accounts and Contacts, users report intermittent "UNABLE_TO_LOCK_ROW" errors during business hours. The integration uses multiple parallel threads and frequently updates parent Accounts and related child Contacts. What is the MOST likely architectural cause and primary mitigation?

A multinational company must implement customer access controls with these requirements: users in one country must never see records from another country; some executives need cross-country visibility; and sharing must remain maintainable as the org grows. Which design BEST meets these requirements?

An architect is asked to review a proposed solution that uses synchronous Apex callouts from triggers to a third-party risk engine for every Opportunity update. The risk engine sometimes responds in 4–8 seconds. Users already complain about slow saves. What is the BEST architectural recommendation?