System Design
Master the art of designing large-scale distributed systems. Learn how to think about scalability, reliability, and performance in technical interviews.
AI platform design cases
Design a Multi-Tenant RAG Platform →
Design ingestion, authorized retrieval and source-backed generation with explicit capacity assumptions and deletion semantics.
Design an Agent Execution Platform →
Design bounded jobs, worker claims, checkpoints, approvals and idempotent tools with measurable capacity and failure behavior.
Design a Multi-Provider LLM Gateway →
Route model requests with tenant quotas, bounded retries, streaming and auditable usage.
Design an AI Evaluation Platform →
Run versioned evaluation suites with isolated workers, reproducible evidence and release gates.
Design a Document Ingestion Platform →
Build an asynchronous document-to-index pipeline with versioned jobs, isolated parsing and reliable deletion.
Key Concepts
Back-of-envelope Estimation
Calculate traffic, storage, and bandwidth needs for system design.
Key Topics:
- •QPS Calculations
- •Storage Estimation
- •Bandwidth Requirements
- •Memory Caching
High-Level Design
Create overall architecture with major components and their interactions.
Key Topics:
- •Component Diagrams
- •Data Flow
- •System Architecture
- •Service Boundaries
Scalability
Design systems that can handle growing amounts of work efficiently.
Key Topics:
- •Horizontal vs Vertical Scaling
- •Load Balancing
- •Auto-scaling
- •Microservices
Databases
Choose and design appropriate data storage solutions.
Key Topics:
- •SQL vs NoSQL
- •Database Sharding
- •Replication
- •Indexing
Caching
Improve performance with intelligent caching strategies.
Key Topics:
- •Cache Strategies
- •CDN
- •Redis/Memcached
- •Cache Invalidation
Message Queues
Enable asynchronous communication between services.
Key Topics:
- •Kafka
- •RabbitMQ
- •Pub/Sub
- •Event-Driven Architecture
API Design
Create robust and scalable API interfaces.
Key Topics:
- •REST
- •GraphQL
- •gRPC
- •API Versioning
Distributed Systems
Build systems across multiple machines and data centers.
Key Topics:
- •CAP Theorem
- •Consistency Models
- •Consensus Algorithms
- •Distributed Transactions