System Design Interview Questions

Kavya C. - "MTBF is Mean time between failures. This is measured to figure out how reliable a system is by what is the gap between 2 failures. (Total time elapsed- Down time)/No of failures"See full answer

Anonymous Salamander - "Microservices are small parts of a application we can deploy them seprately and use them as a application feature."See full answer

Anonymous Hyena - "A load balancer accepts requests from clients (e.g. web browsers on the Internet) and backend services (e.g. a web server). Load balancers are useful for replicating backend services onto multiple machines to meet increased demand. The design of a load balancer should address the following questions: What protocols should be supported? IP allows computers to communicate using packets, similarly to how people send letters. IP packets are addressed using an IP address and port number. "See full answer

S R. - "Did pretty ok. Gathered requirements, back of the envelope calculations and drew out the typical system design with details of components. Dug in deep into each box and probed around why it was needed."See full answer

Abdurhman M. - "Graphic design is the process of visual communication and problem-solving through the use of typography, photography"See full answer

Adesegun K. - "While all branches should ideally be tested, some are more critical than others based on the following factors: A. High-Risk or Business-Critical Logic Branches that handle authentication & authorization (e.g., login, role-based access control) Financial transactions or payment processing logic (e.g., tax calculations, refunds, invoice generation) Security-related branches (e.g., encryption/decryption, token verification) B. Error Handling & Exception Paths Branches that deal with error conditi"See full answer

shg - "(This was not search autocomplete based on prefix matching question.) First of all, please note :- The interviewer is not expecting you to get to the right answer in just 1 hr. These systems have been designed over months and improved over years and its impractical for anyone to expect you to get to the right answer in 1 hr. (There is no one single right answer). At the end, the interviewer (director level person) told me the same. What they are looking for is your thought process, getting from"See full answer

Amy M. - "Before we head into this - let's redefine this question to identify some objectives and key results: re-Design FB security privacy intimacy a few questions I want to clarify are: Is this for desktop, mobi web, or apps? Apps Is this for US only? Yes May I assume some resources available for me? Such as Designers, Data Scientists, Developers? Sure ----- Okay let me think about this for a min ---- I'd like to start off by: Thinking about th"See full answer

Adib M. - "(1) Goals/Value Proposition: Provide context on why the API migration is important and the value add / benefits of doing so to the customer. Need to generate excitement.... (2) Identify stakeholders from Customer and internally for this API Migration. (3) Kick off Meeting : Invite stakeholders, agree on Communication Plan, (4) Planning: Create migration plan, internal development testing resources, timelines, how will we support our customers, testing strategy, rollout plan, rollback plan "See full answer

Faraz A. - "Describe basics of web browser and http request. Then go into Google's search engine. For follow-up questions, talked about http vs https (encryption), sql vs nosql data store, s3 blob storage, encryption policies, retention policies."See full answer

Jagan M. - "This system design question is very small compared to other questions like design instagram, twitter, google drive etc... Since the design involves less components the level of detail we have to go in them were deep. I had to explain how to deal with all the NFR for the distributed cache system. Whether it is a push model or a pull model. Hade to do BOE calculations for the database too."See full answer