Grokking the Modern System Design Interview*

Everything you need for Grokking the System Design Interview, developed by FAANG engineers. Master distributed system fundamentals & practice real-world interview questions.

Intermediate

521 Lessons

50h

Certificate of Completion

Everything you need for Grokking the System Design Interview, developed by FAANG engineers. Master distributed system fundamentals & practice real-world interview questions.

AI-POWERED LEARNING

Mock Interview

Explanations

AI-POWERED LEARNING

Mock Interview

Explanations

Course Overview

System Design Interviews decide your level and compensation at top tech companies. To succeed, you must design scalable systems, justify trade-offs, and explain decisions under time pressure. Most candidates struggle because they lack a repeatable method. Built by FAANG engineers, this is the definitive System Design Interview course. You will master distributed systems building blocks: databases, caches, load balancers, messaging, microservices, sharding, replication, and consistency, and learn the patter...Show More

Course Content

System Design Interviews

The Architect’s Mindset

Reusable Building Blocks

Iterate Your Design

Coding vs. Designing

High-Level Thinking

Three-Step Interview Flow

Step 1: Clarify Needs

Step 2: Understand Data

Step 3: Pick Components

Design Is Trade-offs

How would you fix this?

The 10x Load Shock

What's Your First Move?

Interview Red Flags

Recap: System Design Interviews

System Design Primer

Introduction

Abstraction in System Design

The Art of Ignoring Details

Abstraction in Databases

The Illusion of Local Calls

How RPC Travels

Step 1: Packing the Order

Step 2: The Journey

Step 3: Execution & Return

Who Uses RPC?

The Consistency Trade-off

Strict vs. Eventual

Causal Consistency

Scenario: The Facebook Comments

Failures in System Design

Distributed Systems Recap

Non Functional Requirements

What is Availability?

The Cost of Nines

What is Reliability?

Availability vs. Reliability

Metrics for reliability

What is Scalability?

Scaling Strategies

Vertical Scaling (Scale Up)

Horizontal Scaling (Scale Out)

Scaling Decision

Fault Tolerance

The Safety Net: Replication

What is Maintainability?

MTTR: The Critical Link

System Design Pillars

Back-of-the-envelope Calculations

Inside the Data Center

Web Servers: The Front Door

App Servers: The Brain

Storage Servers: The Vault

Estimate Before You Build

The Napkin Math Superpower

The Speed Hierarchy

CPU bound vs. IO-bound

Real World: Scaling Twitter

The Peak Traffic Trap

Estimator's Checklist

Building Blocks

Don't Reinvent the Wheel

The Architect's Toolkit

Managing Traffic

Storing Data

Speed & Delivery

Health & Communication

Picking the Right Storage Block

Messaging, Routing & Compute Blocks

System Design First Steps

Domain Name System

12 Lessons

Load Balancer

14 Lessons

Databases

15 Lessons

10.

CDN

13 Lessons

11.

Sequencer

12 Lessons

12.

Distributed Monitoring

19 Lessons

13.

Distributed Cache

17 Lessons

14.

Distributed Messaging Queue

17 Lessons

15.

Pub-Sub

12 Lessons

16.

Rate Limiter

15 Lessons

17.

Blob Store

19 Lessons

19.

Distributed Logging

12 Lessons

20.

Distributed Task Scheduler

13 Lessons

21.

Sharded Counters

12 Lessons

22.

RESHADED FRAMEWORK

7 Lessons

23.

Design YouTube

16 Lessons

25.

Design Google Maps

14 Lessons

26.

Design Yelp

13 Lessons

27.

Design Uber

16 Lessons

28.

Design Twitter

14 Lessons

29.

Design Newsfeed

14 Lessons

30.

Design Instagram

15 Lessons

31.

Design TinyURL

13 Lessons

32.

Design Web Crawler

14 Lessons

33.

Design Whatsapp

16 Lessons

34.

Design TypeAhead

14 Lessons

35.

Design Google Docs

14 Lessons

Trusted by 1.4 million developers working at companies

Anthony Walker

@_webarchitect_

Evan Dunbar

ML Engineer

Carlos Matias La Borde

Software Developer

Souvik Kundu

Front-end Developer

Vinay Krishnaiah

Software Developer

Eric Downs

Musician/Entrepeneur

Kenan Eyvazov

DevOps Engineer

Souvik Kundu

Front-end Developer

Eric Downs

Musician/Entrepeneur

Anthony Walker

@_webarchitect_

Evan Dunbar

ML Engineer

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Personalized Interview Prep

Skip the LeetCode grind with a custom roadmap that adapts to your goals. Hands-on practice for Coding Interviews, System Design, and more.

Mock Interviews

Test your skills in a simulated interview setting. Receive personalized feedback based on your performance. Available for Coding Interviews, System Design, and more.

AI Prompt

Build prompt engineering skills. Practice implementing AI-informed solutions.

Code Feedback

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Explain

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AI Code Mentor

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