Awareness of engineering and operational challenges at massive scale including global network optimization, multi region failover and redundancy, integration of cloud and on premise systems, security and compliance at scale, performance and latency for a global user base, cost optimization across large fleets, and maintaining reliability without exponential operational complexity. Candidates should demonstrate thinking about architecture patterns, trade offs, monitoring and incident response at scale, and strategies for evolving platform capabilities as load and feature sets grow.
HardSystem Design
0 practiced
Design a global traffic management system to route users to the nearest healthy region with automatic failover and weighted routing. Requirements: support 200M users, 10M requests/sec, session affinity for stateful apps, <100ms DNS resolution, and failover detection within 30s. Describe components, health-check strategies, consistency implications, and trade-offs.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
Your ingestion pipeline stalls because Kafka consumer lag grows to millions of messages during traffic spikes. Propose architectural and operational changes: partitioning strategy, consumer scaling, batching, backpressure handling, idempotent processing, and retention strategies to restore throughput while preserving data correctness.
EasyTechnical
0 practiced
Describe the role of an API gateway in a multi-region deployment. Which gateway features (SSL termination, routing, authentication, rate limiting, circuit breaking, observability) are most critical to ensure reliability and low latency globally, and how would you architect redundancy for the gateway itself?
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
You manage a fleet of 10,000 VMs running batch workloads with variable demand. Propose a cost-optimization plan covering rightsizing, instance types (including spot/preemptible), scheduling windows, workload packing, and the telemetry you need to validate savings and safety. Discuss risks and mitigations for using spot instances for critical jobs.
MediumSystem Design
0 practiced
Design a logging pipeline that ingests, processes, and provides query access to 1 TB/day of logs from multiple regions with less than 30-second ingestion latency for recent logs. Cover collection agents, queueing (e.g., Kafka), indexing, storage tiering, retention policies, compression, and how to control costs while meeting SLAs.
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