Systems Design and Scalability Questions

Focuses on designing scalable distributed systems and marketplace architectures. Topics include core marketplace components such as search and discovery, real time availability, booking and reservation flows, payment processing, and host to guest matching and how those systems interact. Expect to identify scalability bottlenecks, propose caching strategies, database optimization including sharding and replication, horizontal scaling approaches, and reason about consistency versus availability trade offs. Also cover real time synchronization strategies, handling race conditions such as double booking, event driven designs and message based architectures, and considerations for monitoring and operational resilience.