The System Design Interview for Senior Engineers

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The System Design Interview for Senior Engineers

The System Design Interview for Senior Engineers

A guided, multi-course journey that builds this skill from the ground up. Work through the chapters in order, or jump to any lesson.

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1What Is System Design?2What System Design Means at the Senior Level 3What Is a System Design Interview?4The Seven-Step Template and Your First Scoped Prompt

5Why Systems Become Distributed: Benefits and Costs 6Scaling: Vertical, Horizontal, and Partitioning Basics 7Availability, Reliability, and Single Points of Failure 8SLIs, SLOs, and Error Budgets as Design Inputs 9Consistency Under Replication Lag and Network Partitions 10Latency, Throughput, and Tail Latency 11Little’s Law: From QPS to Concurrency and Overload 12Operability and Cost as Design Constraints

13Building Blocks of System Design: Mapping Requirements to Components 14DNS, TCP, and TLS: The Network Path Before Your Service 15Load Balancing: Health Checks, Routing Algorithms, and Failure Domains 16Caching and CDNs: Placement, Invalidation, and Freshness 17Databases: SQL vs. NoSQL, Replication, and Sharding 18Object Storage and Key-Value Stores: Separating Metadata From Content 19Message Queues and Pub/Sub: Decoupling, Backpressure, and Delivery Guarantees 20Rate Limiting Algorithms and Distributed Counters 21Observability: Metrics, Logs, and Traces Tied to SLIs

22Partitioning in Depth: Consistent Hashing, Rebalancing, and Hot Keys 23Leader Election, Leases, and Fencing Tokens 24Quorums and Tunable Consistency 25Distributed Transactions: Sagas, the Transactional Outbox, and Change Data Capture 26Multi-Region Architecture: Active-Active, Failover, RTO, and RPO

27Design a URL Shortener: Encoding, Caching, and the Redirect Path 28Design Pastebin: Content Storage, Expiry, and Cleanup 29Design a Distributed Key-Value Store: Partitioning, Quorums, and Repair 30Design a Unique ID Generator: Time Ordering, Collisions, and Clock Skew

31Design a News Feed: Fan-Out, Caching, and Hotspot Control 32Design a Photo-Sharing Service: Media Pipeline, Blob Storage, and CDN Delivery 33Design Typeahead Autocomplete: Low-Latency Serving and Index Pipelines 34Design a Web Crawler: Queues, Politeness, and Deduplication

35Design a Chat System: Connections, Ordering, and Message History 36Chat Reliability: Retries, Idempotency Keys, Deduplication, and Backpressure 37Design a Notification System: Fan-Out, Preferences, and Multi-Channel Delivery 38Notification Resilience: Provider Outages, Retry Storms, and Backoff

39Design a Video Streaming Platform: Upload, Transcoding, and CDN Delivery 40Design a Ride-Sharing Service: Location Updates, Nearby Search, and Matching 41Design a File Storage and Sync Service: Chunking, Deduplication, and Metadata 42File Sync Deep Dive: Streaming Sync, Resumability, and Conflicts

43Tackling an Unseen System Design Prompt 44Running a Timed Mock Interview 45Scoring Your Design and Choosing What to Drill Next

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