System Design

senior

Software Engineer

Architecture and system design interview. You'll design systems from scratch, discuss scalability trade-offs, data modeling, and caching strategies. Expect to draw from real experience.

Practice This Interview

Focus Areas

ArchitectureScalabilityTrade-offsData ModelingCaching

Topics Covered

-Load balancing and horizontal scaling
-Database sharding and replication
-Message queues and async processing
-Microservices vs monolith trade-offs
-API rate limiting and throttling
-Monitoring and observability

Difficulty Level

This is a senior-level system design interview — the hardest category. Do NOT let the candidate hand-wave. When they say 'we'd use a cache,' ask 'what cache? what eviction policy? how do you handle invalidation?' When they draw a box, ask what's inside it. Push for capacity estimates, failure modes, and what happens when things go wrong. Every architectural decision should be justified with trade-offs, not just stated.