Centers on system and solution design decisions and the trade offs inherent in architecture choices. Candidates should be able to identify alternatives, clarify constraints such as scale cost and team capability, and articulate trade offs like consistency versus availability, latency versus throughput, simplicity versus extensibility, monolith versus microservices, synchronous versus asynchronous patterns, database selection, caching strategies, and operational complexity. This topic covers methods for quantifying or qualitatively evaluating impacts, prototyping and measuring performance, planning incremental migrations, documenting decisions, and proposing mitigation and monitoring plans to manage risk and maintainability.
EasyTechnical
36 practiced
You manage a public API consumed by external developers. Compare the trade-offs between URI versioning (e.g., /v1/), header-based version negotiation, and a versionless semantic strategy that relies on strict backward compatibility. Consider developer experience, operational complexity, rollback, and migration effort in your recommendation.
HardSystem Design
28 practiced
Design a high-throughput streaming ingestion and processing system for telemetry that must handle 1,000,000 events per second. Discuss batching versus continuous streaming, windowing strategies, exactly-once versus at-least-once processing semantics, stateful processing considerations, storage choices, backpressure handling, and operational complexity for debugging and scaling.
MediumTechnical
38 practiced
A stakeholder asks you to prioritize technical debt reduction versus shipping a high-impact feature. As a TPM, propose a quantifiable framework that balances short-term business impact with long-term risk. Include suggested metrics, experiments to validate impact, timeboxes, and a communication plan to align product, engineering, and leadership.
HardSystem Design
32 practiced
Design a webhook delivery system that needs to send millions of webhook events per day to external endpoints with variable reliability. Cover delivery semantics (at-least-once, exactly-once), retry and backoff strategy, per-destination rate limits, batching, ordering guarantees, dead-letter queues, idempotency strategies, and how you would provide visibility to customers about delivery status.
HardTechnical
27 practiced
Design an authentication and authorization approach for a platform exposing both internal and external APIs. Compare API keys, OAuth2 flows (client_credentials, authorization_code), mTLS, and token introspection in terms of security posture, revocation complexity, developer friction, and scalability. Propose a hybrid approach with a rollout plan and migration considerations.
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