salesforce-technical-architectlisted

# Salesforce Certified Technical Architect (CTA) — Skills Reference ## Overview The Salesforce Certified Technical Architect (CTA) is the pinnacle credential in the Salesforce ecosystem. It validates the ability to design and implement secure, high-performance, integrated solutions on the Salesforce Lightning Platform at enterprise scale — and to defend those decisions under challenge before a panel of senior peers. Unlike every other Salesforce certification, the CTA is not a multiple-choice exam; it is a live architectural defense before three to four sitting CTAs who probe trade-offs, attack weak decisions, and score independently across seven domains. **This file is an operational playbook, not an exam outline.** Each section states the actual rule, the concrete numbers, the decision criteria, and the anti-patterns to catch in review. When you make an architecture or implementation decision, apply these rules and use them to catch your own mistakes. Verify assumptions against the live org with describe/SOQL tooling before writing a mapper or trusting a UI tool's "success." > **Load this skill when…** designing cross-cloud or multi-org architecture; reviewing integration patterns (API choice, auth flow, idempotency); evaluating org strategy (single vs. multi-org); reviewing security models at the architecture level (SSO/OAuth, identity federation, FLS design across systems). > **Not this skill:** single-cloud configuration (cases, flows, console) → see the cloud-consul