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Updated 2 months ago

Salesforce System Design Interview Questions

These System Design questions are grounded in Salesforce’s engineering philosophy: earn and keep customer trust through a secure and multi-tenant cloud.

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Overview

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Salesforce’s platform serves every customer from a single, metadata-driven, multi-tenant stack. That architecture must stay fast, reliable, and isolated for 150K+ organizations — making the Salesforce System Design Interview a critical round in the onsite loop (expect to set aside about 60 minutes). You might be asked to design a tenant-isolated CRM data layer, a real-time event bus for Platform Events, or a cross-cloud integration hub. Expect follow-ups on capacity sizing, tenant throttling, failure domains, and release safety that echo Salesforce’s #1 engineering value: Trust. This adaptive roadmap mirrors those expectations. You’ll first cement distributed-systems fundamentals (caching, sharding, consensus, rate limiting), then tackle Salesforce-specific challenges like multi-tenant data partitioning, org-level limits, metadata extensibility, and zero-downtime deployments.

Salesforce’s platform serves every customer from a single, metadata-driven, multi-tenant stack. That architecture must stay fast...Show More

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

A structured playbook for Salesforce’s 45–60-minute System Design interview, covering requirements clarification, ball-park sizing, trade-off analysis, and production validation.

Reusable design patterns for rock-solid tenant isolation — data partitioning, governor limits, and noisy-neighbor mitigation that keep one org from impacting another.

Event-driven and asynchronous workflows built with queues, pub-sub, and idempotent processors for cross-cloud integrations and high-throughput APIs.

Latency-and-trust tactics that blend caching, replication, and encryption to meet tight SLA and availability targets while safeguarding customer data.

Scale-hardening and monitoring practices to throttle hot-tenant fan-out, plan regional failovers, and surface bottlenecks before they reach millions of users.

Straightforward formulas for estimating storage, throughput, and compute — skills interviewers expect on every System Design problem.

A structured playbook for Salesforce’s 45–60-minute System Design interview, covering requirements clarification, ball-park sizing, trade-off analysis, and production validation.

Content

180 Lessons140 Quizzes

System Design Interviews

5 Lessons

Getting Ready for the System Design Interview

Key Concepts to Prepare for the System Design Interview

Resources to Prepare for a System Design Interview

The Do’s and Don’ts of the System Design Interview

Let AI Evaluate your System Design Interview Preparation

Introduction

2 Lessons

Introduction to Modern System Design

Course Structure for Modern System Design

Abstractions

4 Lessons

Non-functional System Characteristics

6 Lessons

Back-of-the-envelope Calculations

2 Lessons

Building Blocks

1 Lessons

Domain Name System

2 Lessons

Load Balancers

3 Lessons

Databases

5 Lessons

10.

Key-value Store

5 Lessons

11.

Content Delivery Network (CDN)

7 Lessons

12.

Sequencer

3 Lessons

13.

Distributed Monitoring

3 Lessons

14.

Monitor Server-side Errors

3 Lessons

15.

Monitor Client-side Errors

2 Lessons

16.

Distributed Cache

6 Lessons

Distributed Cache System

Mock Interview

Premium

17.

Distributed Messaging Queue

7 Lessons

18.

Pub-sub

3 Lessons

Pub-Sub

Mock Interview

Premium

19.

Rate Limiter

5 Lessons

20.

Blob Store

6 Lessons

Blob Store

Mock Interview

Premium

21.

Distributed Search

6 Lessons

22.

Distributed Logging

3 Lessons

23.

Distributed Task Scheduler

5 Lessons

24.

Sharded Counters

4 Lessons

25.

Concluding the Building Blocks Discussion

4 Lessons

26.

Design YouTube

6 Lessons

TikTok

Mock Interview

Premium

27.

Design Quora

5 Lessons

28.

Design Google Maps

6 Lessons

29.

Design a Proximity Service / Yelp

5 Lessons

30.

Design Uber

7 Lessons

Uber Eats

Mock Interview

Premium

31.

Design Twitter

6 Lessons

32.

Design Newsfeed System

4 Lessons

33.

Design Instagram

5 Lessons

NewsFeed

Mock Interview

Premium

34.

Design a URL Shortening Service / TinyURL

6 Lessons

35.

Design a Web Crawler

5 Lessons

36.

Design WhatsApp

6 Lessons

Facebook Messenger

Mock Interview

Premium

37.

Design Typeahead Suggestion

7 Lessons

38.

Design a Collaborative Document Editing Service / Google Docs

5 Lessons

39.

Spectacular Failures

4 Lessons

ChatGPT

Mock Interview

Premium

40.

Concluding Remarks

1 Lessons

Certificate of Completion

Showcase your accomplishment by sharing your certificate of completion.

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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.

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