"Design a social feed in 45 minutes." This question separates senior engineers from everyone else. Master the 4-step frameworkused by engineers at top tech companies.
Follow this proven structure in every system design interview
Clarify functional and non-functional requirements. Ask about scale, users, and constraints.
Draw the core components: clients, servers, databases, caches. Show data flow.
Go deep on critical components. Discuss trade-offs and alternatives.
Handle bottlenecks, failure scenarios, and edge cases.
Distribute traffic across servers
L7/L4, Round Robin, Consistent Hashing
Handle growing data needs
Sharding, Replication, Partitioning
Speed up read-heavy systems
Redis, Memcached, CDN
Async processing & decoupling
Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS
Serve static content globally
CloudFlare, Fastly, Akamai
Data consistency patterns
CAP Theorem, ACID, BASE
Feed, Timeline, Real-time
Hashing, Database
Media, CDN, Feed
Messaging, Presence, E2E
Video, Streaming, CDN
Geolocation, Matching
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