System Design Interview Guide

System Design Interview Guide

System Design Interview Guide

This comprehensive guide will help you ace system design interviews at top tech companies. Based on my experience passing interviews at Microsoft, Google, and AWS, plus coaching 50+ engineers to land Director/VP roles.

Why System Design Matters

System design interviews are the #1 differentiator for senior engineering roles. Companies test:

  • Scalability thinking - Can you build systems that handle millions of users?
  • Trade-off analysis - Do you understand when to choose what?
  • Technical depth - Do you know distributed systems fundamentals?
  • Communication - Can you explain complex ideas clearly?

Core Concepts to Master

1. Scalability Fundamentals

  • Horizontal vs Vertical scaling
  • Load balancing strategies
  • Database sharding and partitioning
  • Caching layers (Redis, Memcached, CDN)

2. Distributed Systems

  • CAP Theorem and trade-offs
  • Consistency models (eventual, strong, causal)
  • Consensus algorithms (Raft, Paxos)
  • Distributed transactions

3. Data Storage

  • SQL vs NoSQL decision framework
  • Database replication patterns
  • Data partitioning strategies
  • Time-series and graph databases

4. Communication Patterns

  • REST vs GraphQL vs gRPC
  • Message queues (Kafka, SQS, RabbitMQ)
  • Event-driven architecture
  • WebSockets and real-time systems

5. Reliability & Resilience

  • Circuit breakers and retry patterns
  • Health checks and monitoring
  • Disaster recovery strategies
  • Chaos engineering principles

Practice These Designs

Here are the most commonly asked system design problems:

  1. Design Twitter/X - Feed generation, fanout, real-time updates
  2. Design URL Shortener - Hash functions, collision handling, analytics
  3. Design YouTube - Video streaming, transcoding, CDN
  4. Design WhatsApp - Real-time messaging, presence, encryption
  5. Design Uber - Location tracking, matching, surge pricing
  6. Design Netflix - Recommendation engine, content delivery
  7. Design Dropbox - File sync, chunking, conflict resolution
  8. Design Instagram - Photo storage, feed ranking, stories

My Top Articles on System Design

Explore detailed posts:

Get Expert Help

Need personalized coaching for your system design interviews?

I’ve helped 50+ engineers land offers at FAANG companies with an average $285K compensation increase.

Free Resources

Get my interview preparation kit with templates and guides:

Loading...

Questions? Reach out on LinkedIn or Twitter.