IoT Systems Architecture and Design Questions

Covers architecture and design of distributed Internet of Things systems and connected embedded devices. Core topics include edge computing patterns, sensor and actuator network topologies, gateway and mesh network architectures, cloud integration and data pipelines, and trade offs between edge processing and cloud processing. Also includes networking protocols commonly used in constrained environments such as WiFi, Bluetooth, ZigBee, and LoRaWAN, plus connectivity strategies for unreliable networks including buffering, retries, offline operation, and data aggregation and filtering. Candidates may be evaluated on device to cloud data flow, scalability considerations from hundreds to millions of devices, performance and power trade offs on resource constrained hardware, deployment patterns for gateways and proxies, and high level fault tolerance and monitoring strategies.

MediumSystem Design

71 practiced

Describe deployment patterns for IoT gateways across multiple geographic regions to optimize latency, data residency, and failover. Compare a centralized ingestion model versus regional edge ingestion, discuss synchronization of device metadata and device twin state, and propose a strategy for performing rolling gateway updates with minimal downtime.

HardTechnical

133 practiced

You have a device with 32KB RAM and limited flash. Propose a concrete strategy to run a tinyML anomaly detection model locally. Cover model selection and compression (quantization, pruning), memory mapping and buffer management, inference runtime choice, periodic model updates, and fallback behavior to cloud inference when necessary.

HardSystem Design

95 practiced

Design a device twin replication and reconciliation protocol across geographic regions that guarantees eventual convergence. Compare using CRDTs versus last-writer-wins approaches for complex state such as configuration maps, and describe how you would surface and resolve conflicting operator intents in a user-friendly and auditable way.

HardSystem Design

75 practiced

Design a geo-distributed telemetry ingestion system that guarantees at-least-once delivery and supports reconstructing time-ordered event streams for devices that may reconnect from different regions. Address partitioning strategy, watermarking for event windows, storage tiering for hot and cold data, and approaches to limit duplication and repair out-of-order events during processing.

MediumSystem Design

70 practiced

Propose an architecture to deliver low-latency cloud-to-device commands to 500k devices that sit behind NATs. Discuss session management, persistent connection strategies, message routing and partitioning across brokers, security and authentication, and how you would scale the broker layer and state for client sessions.

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