System Design Q&A and Videos

I received feedback from my manager indicating that I need to improve my understanding of upstream and downstream dependencies when working on big ambiguous problems. They suggested that I should propose solutions that properly consider these dependencies' requirements as in my preview project I missed a few so the tech lead on my team had to point those out. Could you recommend any resources? techniques?

have a new grad system design interview coming up. never did system design interview before, the only knowledge i have about system design is the distributed systems course i took in university

how do i prep for the system design interview in less time? what are the best resources?

If I’m interviewing for an L4 position at FAANG+, I understand that the system design expectations aren’t as high as they would be for more senior roles.

Should I treat the system design interview somewhat like a behavioral round, focusing on skills like breaking down complex tasks, asking clarifying questions, addressing ambiguity, being open to feedback, and showing vulnerability—essentially, qualities expected at a Junior to Mid level?

If I don’t know the specific answers to questions about scaling or other advanced technical topics, would it be fair to approach the system design round as a way to show how I’d collaborate and operate on the team?

My main concern is that if I take this approach, the interviewer might still expect deeper technical knowledge and tell me, “You should already know this and have experience with it.” I am looking to avoid this surprise.

Any insights would be deeply appreciated.

In his course, Alex mentioned that the system design used in practice at companies is very different from the system design studied for interviews.

There are books such as System Design Interview that are used for system design interviews. What's your take on the book?

Designing Data-Intensive Applications is another commonly cited book. What's your take on this book? What other good books you recommend to get better at system design in practice?

There are a few types of architectures floating everywhere such as domain- driven design, hexagonal architecture, event-driven architecture, microservices, etc. I know microservices is very well used in practice. What's your take on the usage of other architectures? They seem pretty abstract. Is learning them worth it?

I learned that my whole team is kind of new (Salesforce acquired this product), and they have just started contributing to the core platform. There are currently a lot of approvals necessary to merge front-end code into the system. This is rough as there's many epics connected to front-end work, and there is not a single senior person in the team which can take charge of looking into the high level architecture, following best practices, and doing better planning to release the code to prod.

I am the only full-stack Staff engineer here, and this is why my EM wants me to create a master front-end tech spec for the team. As an example of something this doc can cover: At Salesforce, there are multiple ways to communicate with the back-end API, each of which has their pros and cons but that information is scattered - We can consolidate that info into this doc.

Given that I haven't written any front-end code here at Salesforce, this task seems hard and I'm unsure how to do this without looking stupid.

I am trying to get better at System Design and trying to understand the design of various systems. I'm very curious about the System Design of Taro, and how Taro is built.

• What technologies are used for frontend and backend?
• What is the backend architecture used? What are the databases used?
• How are the videos streamed, payments handled, user logins handled?
• How does Taro scale with users and give a smooth experience?
• How is the platform optimized from the perspective of cloud costs?
• When the number of users on Taro increases by an order of magnitude, what are the changes to the architecture you would consider doing?
• Is the website built from scratch? Or are there any libraries and frameworks available to make it easier?
• Taro seems like a well-built platform with smooth user experience and a lot of features. I'm surprised that all of this built by just one engineer (Charlie). What's the secret sauce? What are the tradeoffs made to still make things work with less resources?
• What is the decision-making process that went into making all these decisions?

Recently, while working on a project that is very open-ended, I realized part way through the project that the initial solution I had come up with for the problem would work only partially and in order to solve the problem fully, I would actually need double the amount of time I had estimated earlier. Since the initial estimate was in months, I feel really terrible about this. I made sure to report this to my chain as soon as I discovered this, but I'm curious: how common is it for others to miss their estimates? I'd like to gauge whether I am alone in this situation. Furthermore, how do people typically manage the disappointment and pressure that arise from missed deadlines, especially in exploratory or open-ended projects?

How is secrets management done in big tech? What does engineering excellence look like in this part of DevOps?

• I am not great with numbers so capacity planning part for storage, memory, cache, bandwidth takes 5-10mins as part of the initial requirement gathering
• Is there a way to keep it short or you just have to memorize some bytes and 1 million request/day = 12 request/second conversions?

I'm currently studying for software engineering interviews, but I'm having a hard time deciding how to divide up my time between doing LC problems and going over system design concepts. It can feel overwhelming since both categories have so much to cover. I also have a family, so most of my studying gets done after my kid goes to sleep at around 7 PM. Since my team is in the west coast and I'm in the east coast, I do get some extra time in the morning to work out at the gym and go through some LC problems. I'm currently going through Neetcode's course as a refresher. For those of you who have aced your interviews, how did you divide up your time on different topics? Did you mostly spend your time on LeetCode? I'd be happy to hear any recommendations.

My main goal: I want to be interview-ready no matter what. I currently work at a big tech company and I've been there for 4 years now, but I haven't seen much growth and now I'm seeing that I could have negotiated more when I first got my offer. I was asked 2 LC-type problems, and I feel I got lucky with them because I hadn't extensively gone through all the different patterns and data structures. It was my first time getting RSUs and I wish I had known more about negotiation tactics as well. I feel that if I be ready for interviews, I can apply and definitely increase my comp by a lot. The motivation is for me to overcome the fear of DS&A problems and not stop myself from applying to positions just because I'd be asked LC-type questions. I also know that I can double my comp with the right negotiation tactics and with my years of experience.

It seems that containerization and serverless are two competing cloud-native technologies. In big tech, which technology is more common and therefore more valuable to have for a new candidate?

I want to understand how people approach planning/scoping out complex projects with multiple unknowns and potential blockers.

Also, how do you effectively communicate to leadership when working on such projects? What matters to them the most? Do the updates need to be dense?

I'm currently working on building blockchain infrastructure. I would like to build my profile to be a good infra engineer capable of building any type of infra. How to find some good side-projects to strengthen my abilities as an infra engineer. What are the different aspects I should master while doing the side projects?

This is what I am thinking of doing as of now. I'm planning to build a social media platform using different architectures such as microservices, event-driven architecture, monolithic architecture, and trying to deploy in various ways such as using K8S, deploying it on ECS, etc., and comparing the performance. It seems pretty big. Is this the right size and a good example for a side project for infra engineers? Please suggest anything else I could do get better.

Hi!

I had mic issues in the OH and couldn't ask live. How would you recommend I prepare for System Design interview questions, especially since I feel my experience at my previous company didn't prepare me well for these?

I have 2.5 years of experience at a big tech company and was recently laid off. Ideally, I’m aiming for an ~L4 level position as I was L3 in my past role and was nearing promotion. I’m getting more interviews at start-ups now, and they typically focus on system design rather than leetcode questions. At my past company, the tools were so powerful that I didn’t get the same breadth of experience a new grad might get at a smaller company. For example, I never touched or thought about our database or considered scalability for our services. In hindsight, I should have taken the initiative to find projects outside of my team with more scope, but now I know better!

My current plan is to read "System Design Interview" by Alex Xu and go through the Taro System Design Masterclass. Do you have any feedback on this plan? I recently had my first system design interviews and have more coming up. I want to prepare as best as I can with the time I have. I’ve accepted that I may not excel at first, but any feedback to improve my preparation plan and mindset would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

How common is it that folks self-sabotage their interviews? I think I might have during one of them unintentionally. I had interviewed at a FAANGMULA company and mentioned a competitor. The pay was low compared to my level, but also, I felt like it was more junior and I tended to go very long winded (lack of practice) for various questions. It seems I am a bit out of practice for soft skill interview screens, though usually I kick butt on these and spend way more time on DSA than anything (my weakest area since I'm rusty and system design and behavioral interviews don't scare me at all).

Thoughts?

Are there any AI tools or other resources that can provide feedback on systems design answers to specific questions specifically for infra, cloud and devops projects?

For someone starting to study Systems Design for interviews, is there a roadmap we should follow so that we understand concepts in increasing order of difficulties?

Is there any course here on Taro that mentions this topic?

I don't understand the difference between a Software Architecture document and a RFC. Are they the same?

I once heard that one can't get promoted if they have never proposed an RFC.

Hi! Will the recording for the chapter 9 of the Taro Book Club: Designing Data Intensive Applications - Chapter 9 (Consistency & Consensus) be available? Thanks!

I was recently asked to design an autocomplete system. I suggested a solution where results by prefix are physically cached to a CDN. I was told that this solution isn't optimal because it represents an inefficient storage approach. I'm trying to understand an optimal solution.

Some alternatives I can think of:

1. S3 - better storage cost, too slow
2. Redis - about as fast, but more expensive
3. Dynamo - about as fast, I don't know how it compares on cost

I think the main two cost components will be storage and read cost. I'm having trouble finding useful comparative data on these. Is it commonly understood/thought that Dynamo is cheaper than a CDN at scale, or is there some other design I'm not thinking of?

is a nice series explaining what is wanted and talks about further iteration, but how can this happen in parallel or complementary if there is an environment that is doing SCRUM by the book?

I am mostly concerned about the time for meetings, since the ideal in this project is to make the engineers who will develop somewhat part of the design process to increase agency and accountability.

Are there any suggestions for preparing a mobile app system design? Most of the courses and threads seem to be focused on backend development.

Question: This may seem like a dumb question but, doesn't a technical person administer technical interviews (coding / whiteboarding and systems design)?

So I had a behavioral screen with Meta some time ago and the in-house non-technical recruiter to my surprise oddly asked me a systems design question (I was expected to answer in like 5-15 minutes max which made no sense), I get that they want to get an idea of the candidate's 'product sense,' but I found it quite odd.

Recently, I came across another software engineering coaching platform I joined and went to their practice of DSA and system design interview prep sessions which they run weekly, which oddly I found that non-technical admins (executive assistants) ran, I think it was helpful for offloading administrative scheduling, but they didn't seem to help much since they're actually non-technical.

Context: I've recently received feedback from my manager that my execution on small-medium tasks was very good, but I do struggle scoping out tasks / projects that are more ambiguous. On my most recent work, this led to delays delivering work on time, and concretely defining when the work can be marked as complete.

Question: How do you approach an ambiguous project, where requirements are not very well-defined ? Walk me through your thought process on how you would scope out the problem, align on with your teammates / TL, and land a design :)