Grokking Modern System Design Interview for Engineers & Managers

This course immerses the learner into the design of systems and makes them ready for any new design problems.

Intermediate

179 Lessons

26h

Certificate of Completion

This course immerses the learner into the design of systems and makes them ready for any new design problems.

AI-POWERED

Code Feedback

Mock Interview

Explanations

Prompt

AI-POWERED

Code Feedback

Mock Interview

This course includes

10 AI Prompts

35 AI Feedbacks

5 Playgrounds

138 Quizzes

This course includes

10 AI Prompts

35 AI Feedbacks

5 Playgrounds

138 Quizzes

Course Overview

System Design interviews are now part of every Engineering and Product Management Interview. Interviewers want candidates to exhibit their technical knowledge of core building blocks and the rationale of their design approach. This course presents carefully selected system design problems with detailed solutions that will enable you to handle complex scalability scenarios during an interview or designing new products. You will start with learning a bottom-up approach to designing scalable systems. First, ...Show More

What You'll Learn

A modular approach to System Design Interviews to succeed in any technical interview

Designing complex systems using various building blocks in a microservice architecture

The ability to dive deep into project requirements and constraints for any large-scale complex system

Familiarity with the system design interview, possible questions, and how candidates can prepare and perform well on these interviews

An understanding of a highly adaptive framework that can be used by engineers and managers to solve modern system design interview problems

An understanding of how various popular web-scale services are constructed

The ability to solve any novel interview problem with a robust system design approach using this course as a North Star

What You'll Learn

A modular approach to System Design Interviews to succeed in any technical interview

Course Content

Introduction

This chapter introduces system design and the course, its structure, and prerequisites to set the foundation for mastering system design interviews.

Introduction to Modern System Design

Course Structure for Modern System Design

System Design Interviews

This chapter covers what system design interviews entail, provides preparation techniques and tips, and evaluates your understanding using AI.

What Is a System Design Interview?

How to Prepare for Success

How to Perform Well Let AI Evaluate your System Design Interview Preparation

Abstractions

This chapter emphasizes abstractions in distributed systems, focusing on network abstractions, consistency models, and failure models crucial for system design.

Why Are Abstractions Important?Network Abstractions: Remote Procedure Calls Spectrum of Consistency Models The Spectrum of Failure Models

Non-functional System Characteristics

This chapter focuses on key non-functional characteristics like availability, reliability, scalability, and fault tolerance in system design.

Availability Reliability Scalability Maintainability Fault Tolerance Let AI Evaluate Your Understanding of Non-Functional Requirements

Back-of-the-envelope Calculations

In this chapter, you’ll learn to estimate resource needs and response times using back-of-the-envelope calculations for system design.

Put Back-of-the-envelope Numbers in Perspective Examples of Resource Estimation

Building Blocks

1 Lesson

This chapter introduces the building blocks essential for modern system design, forming the foundation for scalable applications later in the course.

Domain Name System

2 Lessons

This chapter teaches how DNS works and expands on its role in system design, including detailed insights into its design and functionality.

Load Balancers

3 Lessons

This chapter covers load balancers, their placement, and algorithms. It explores local/global load balancers and tiers of load balancers.

Databases

5 Lessons

This chapter introduces databases and their types, data replication, partitioning, and trade-offs, essential for designing distributed systems.

Key-value Store

5 Lessons

This chapter teaches you how to design a scalable key-value store, focusing on replication, versioning, and fault tolerance.

Content Delivery Network (CDN)

7 Lessons

In this chapter, you’ll cover CDN design, content caching strategies, consistency, and techniques for efficient content delivery.

Sequencer

3 Lessons

This chapter teaches you how to design a sequencer for generating unique IDs, with a focus on causality and consistency in distributed systems.

Distributed Monitoring

3 Lessons

This chapter focuses on the basics of a distributed monitoring system, its types, and metrics for effective monitoring.

Monitor Server-side Errors

3 Lessons

In this chapter, you'll learn how to design a monitoring system and visualize it for tracking server-side errors in real-time.

Monitor Client-side Errors

2 Lessons

This chapter teaches you how to design a system to monitor client-side errors, ensuring robust and reliable applications.

Distributed Cache

6 Lessons

This chapter teaches the design of a distributed cache, focusing on high-level and detailed designs, as well as evaluating its performance.

Distributed Messaging Queue

7 Lessons

This chapter covers the design of a distributed messaging queue, addressing requirements, design considerations, and performance evaluations.

Pub-sub

3 Lessons

This chapter teaches the design of a pub-sub system, focusing on how to implement and optimize this communication pattern in distributed systems.

Rate Limiter

5 Lessons

This chapter covers the design of a rate limiter, covering essential algorithms and considerations for managing traffic and ensuring system stability.

Blob Store

6 Lessons

This chapter teaches you how to design a blob store, focusing on scalability, storage, and performance evaluation.

Distributed Search

6 Lessons

This chapter teaches distributed search design in steps, with a special focus on indexing, scaling, and replication.

Distributed Logging

3 Lessons

This chapter teaches the importance and design of a distributed logging service, emphasizing on capturing and analyzing logs across distributed systems.

Distributed Task Scheduler

5 Lessons

This chapter covers the design of a Task scheduler addressing issues like prioritizing, task idempotency, queuing, and resource capacity optimization.

Sharded Counters

4 Lessons

This chapter introduces sharded counters and their importance, starting from high-level design and then pivoting to its detailed system design.

Concluding the Building Blocks Discussion

4 Lessons

This chapter wraps up the discussion on building blocks, evaluates you using AI, and introduces the RESHADED approach to tackle unseen system design problems.

Design YouTube

6 Lessons

This chapter teaches YouTube system design starting with requirements, high and detailed design, evaluation of the design, and handling real-world complexities.

Design Quora

5 Lessons

This chapter teaches the system design of Quora incrementally by starting with key requirements and challenges in building a scalable Q&A platform.

Design Google Maps

6 Lessons

This chapter covers the system design of Google Maps, focusing on API design, scalability, finding optimal routes, and ETA computation.

Design a Proximity Service / Yelp

5 Lessons

This chapter is about the system design of a proximity service like Yelp addressing requirements like searching, scaling, and dynamic segments.

Design Uber

7 Lessons

This chapter teaches you how to design Uber, address requirements for ride-sharing platforms, detailed design, and fraud detection.

Design Twitter

6 Lessons

This chapter teaches Twitter system design, covering aspects like user interaction, API design, caching, storage, and client-side load balancing.

Design Newsfeed System

4 Lessons

This chapter teaches Newsfeed system design, covering aspects like functional/non-functional requirements, storage schemas, Newsfeed generation, and publishing.

Design Instagram

5 Lessons

This chapter is about designing Instagram. It covers API design, storage schema, and timeline generation using pull, push, and hybrid approaches.

Design a URL Shortening Service / TinyURL

6 Lessons

This chapter teaches the system design of a URL shortening service like TinyURL with emphasis on requirements like encoding, scalability, and high readability.

Design a Web Crawler

5 Lessons

This chapter is about the system design of a web crawler. Its key components include a crawler, scheduler, HTML fetcher, storage, and crawling traps handler.

Design WhatsApp

6 Lessons

In this chapter, you'll learn WhatsApp system design with an emphasis on its API design, high security, and low latency of client-server messages.

Design Typeahead Suggestion

7 Lessons

This chapter teaches the Typeahead suggestion system design, covering aspects like efficient data structure and assembler for updating suggestions.

Design a Collaborative Document Editing Service / Google Docs

5 Lessons

This chapter covers the system design of Google Docs, addressing storage, collaborative editing, and handling concurrency issues using different techniques.

Spectacular Failures

4 Lessons

This chapter teaches you how to avoid failures and outages by discussing case studies of real-world, large-scale distributed systems like Facebook, AWS, etc.

Concluding Remarks

1 Lesson

This chapter discusses key takeaways, highlights unique aspects of each design problem, and gives pointers on the next step to master system design.

Trusted by 1.4 million developers working at companies

Anthony Walker

@_webarchitect_

Emma Bostian 🐞

@EmmaBostian

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

Anthony Walker

@_webarchitect_

Emma Bostian 🐞

@EmmaBostian

Hands-on Learning Powered by AI

See how Educative uses AI to make your learning more immersive than ever before.

Instant Code Feedback

Evaluate and debug your code with the click of a button. Get real-time feedback on test cases, including time and space complexity of your solutions.

AI-Powered Mock Interviews

Put your skills to the test in a simulated interview setting. Receive personalized feedback based on your performance. Available in Premium & Premium Plus plans.

Adaptive Learning

At various checkpoints throughout Educative courses, you will be prompted to take a quick assessment. Receive a condensed curriculum tailored to your strengths and skill gaps.

Explain with AI

Select any text within any Educative course, and get an instant explanation — without ever leaving your browser.

AI Code Mentor

AI Code Mentor helps you quickly identify errors in your code, learn from your mistakes, and nudge you in the right direction — just like a 1:1 tutor!