System Design Interview Prep

Practice structured, defensible design conversations for interviews.

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Syllabus

The design conversation

  1. What interviewers evaluate
  2. Clarifying requirements
  3. Functional and non-functional requirements
  4. Estimating scale
  5. A repeatable answer structure

Core building blocks

  1. Clients, APIs and services
  2. Databases and data models
  3. Caching
  4. Queues and asynchronous work
  5. Load balancers and CDNs

Reasoning about trade-offs

  1. Availability and consistency
  2. Partitioning and replication
  3. Rate limiting and backpressure
  4. Reliability and failure modes
  5. Observability and operations

Design walkthroughs

  1. URL shortener
  2. News feed
  3. Chat service
  4. File storage
  5. Notification service

Interview execution

  1. Drawing a clear diagram
  2. Talking through a bottleneck
  3. Making assumptions explicit
  4. Closing with trade-offs
  5. System design revision checklist