Getting Started

Get introduced to what a system design interview is and learn concepts that you need to know to give the interview.

Introduce yourself to the system design interview

System design interviews have gained a lot of steam over the last couple of years and are considered as an important part of onsite interviews with the majority of product development companies. These interviews tend to be very open-ended and conversational. The interviewers assess the candidate based on their technical skills involving thinking about the big picture, logical understanding of the presented problem domain, articulation, as well as on their friendliness (will I be able to work with this person?) and curiosity

In a system design interview which is also referred to as SDI, the candidate is given an example of a popular system and asked to brainstorm a design. During the process, candidates are expected to ask clarifying questions and think through every component, including the data model, keeping scalability, redundancy, fault tolerance, etc. in mind.

The intended audience for this course is software engineers who are interested in designing systems.

How to start?

As the interviewer will be presenting a very vague idea of a system or functionality that you have to design, here’s how you could start:

  1. Take a deep breath and relax! It’s super important to maintain composure to get the best out of your mind. Tension and panicking won’t help you! Although you are going to be judged, no one is going to be mean to you.
  2. Don’t jump into the design right away.
  1. Start thinking through the problem and ask a significant number of clarifying questions. Again, don’t spend 20 minutes asking questions that won’t work. Don’t avoid the problem and waste time with useless chatter!
  2. Discuss the scope of the problem with your interviewer. Don’t try to design each and everything. Remember you have 45 minutes only! You’ve got to identify and focus only on the most important use cases.
  3. Identify the users (actors) of your application. This is important because companies like Amazon obsess over the customer. You will earn brownie points if you are able to specify the actors…
  4. Talk about scale and growth of the system.
  5. Think out loud! Unless the interviewer is capable of penetrating mental discernment, there’s no way for them to peek into your mind.