Covers the end to end process of diagnosing a business or customer problem and developing one or more viable solutions. Expect to generate multiple approaches with different risk and reward profiles, assess feasibility, implementation timeline, resource requirements, costs, trade offs, and alignment with business objectives. Include planning for execution details such as milestones, dependencies, and risk mitigation. Emphasize clear stakeholder communication and recommendation framing, customer focus, anticipation of implementation challenges, and creation of a coherent proposal that justifies the chosen approach and explains why other options were rejected.
MediumSystem Design
40 practiced
An enterprise asks you to modernize a large monolithic application into microservices to reduce deployment time from days to hours. Outline a 12-month migration strategy covering phases (strangler pattern, API stabilization), data partitioning, CI/CD changes, team organization, risk mitigation, rollbacks, and how you would measure progress with milestones.
EasyTechnical
35 practiced
A client asks for a real-time messaging capability. Describe a structured approach to decide whether to build in-house or buy a third-party product. Include evaluation criteria (time-to-market, total cost of ownership, customization needs, data ownership, SLAs, vendor roadmap), how you'd prototype or PoC each option, and how you'd present a recommendation with risks and mitigations.
MediumTechnical
40 practiced
A legacy on-prem ERP exposes limited APIs and a nightly batch export. Propose integration patterns that allow your SaaS product to integrate reliably: adapters, gateway patterns, idempotency, schema evolution handling, error handling, offline reconciliation, and a testing strategy to validate integrations across dozens of customers.
EasyTechnical
34 practiced
Explain how you would estimate compute, storage, and networking resources for a new service expected to reach 10,000 daily active users in year one. Describe the data sources you would use (benchmarks, historical analogs), assumptions to document, safety margins, and how you would validate and iterate on the estimates after launch.
HardSystem Design
45 practiced
Design three tenancy models for a multi-tenant SaaS product: shared-schema, separate-schema-per-tenant, and isolated-VPC per tenant. For each option, analyze security/isolation, upgrade and migration complexity, operational cost at 1k/10k/100k tenants, and recommend a migration path and backup strategy for the chosen model.
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