Hire Technical Architecture Intern: skills, stipend and screening

The three that matter most are Enough technical depth to be credible with engineers; Requirement to constraint translation; Trade-off reasoning: consistency, latency, cost. Beyond those, look for working familiarity with Diagramming tools, ADR templates, Cloud reference architectures. Everything else on the list above is teachable inside a term — treating it as an entry requirement shrinks your pool without improving the hire.

Write one specification an engineer can build from without a follow-up meeting. That is sized for eight to twelve weeks of supervised work by someone with the fundamentals and no production experience. A second, smaller piece — write three architecture decision records for choices currently held only in people’s heads — usually fits alongside it. Anything requiring independent production judgement should stay with the reviewer.

Start from ₹18,000–₹42,000 a month, then adjust for city and duration: metros at the top, tier-2 typically 25–40% lower, and six-month commitments above six-week ones. Publish the number in the listing — "as per industry standards" is read as low or undecided, and it costs you applications from exactly the candidates who had another option.

For a first pass, yes. Ask "Design a URL shortener, then tell me what breaks at 100x traffic." and judge whether the answer is specific and consistent — you are checking for whether they can reason past the happy path, which does not require you to know the subject. A Software Architecture practitioner should still take the second round, because at that point you are assessing depth rather than authenticity.

Realistically two to four hours a week of a competent person: a longer session early on, then short daily availability and a weekly review. Below that, the intern stalls and produces nothing you can use. Above it, you are doing the work yourself. That time is the true cost of the hire, and it is what the stipend line in your budget does not show.

"Technical" in front of a business title means the person must hold a conversation with engineers without an interpreter. Screen for enough depth to be credible, not for the ability to build. In screening terms, that means adding one specific check: enough technical depth to be credible with engineers.

Specificity does most of the work. A listing that names the project, the tools and the deliverable filters itself, because candidates can tell whether they fit. Adding one screening question to the application — from the set above — removes most of the rest without adding a review round.

First applications typically arrive within about two hours of the listing going live, and most employers hiring a Software Architecture intern have a workable shortlist inside a week. Speed depends more on how specific the brief is than on the stipend — a listing with a named project and named tools consistently outperforms a generic one at the same money.