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Senior Software Engineer System Design Interview Questions

Created by ex-MAANG architects, this guide will help you prep confidently for Senior Software Engineer System Design Interviews.
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For senior engineers, System Design is at the core of every hiring loop. Most top companies dedicate a 45-60-minute round to test how you translate vague product goals into scalable, resilient architecture. You might be asked to design a globally consistent chat service, a low-latency analytics pipeline, or a tiered storage platform. Interviewers evaluate your requirements gathering, sizing estimates, trade-off reasoning, and leadership in steering the conversation toward sound technical decisions. This adaptive roadmap mirrors senior-level expectations. You’ll master problems modeled on interviews from top-tier big tech companies. Each scenario reflects the expectations placed on senior-level software engineers: evaluating system bottlenecks, managing cross-service dependencies, and planning for long-term scale and reliability. Each question comes with rich context, architecture diagrams, solution paths, and evaluation frameworks designed to sharpen your senior-level engineering judgment.
For senior engineers, System Design is at the core of every hiring loop. Most top companies dedicate a 45-60-minute round to tes...Show More

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

A senior-caliber playbook for the 45–60-minute System Design interview — requirement clarification, ball-park sizing, trade-off analysis, and production validation.
Architecture patterns for real-time messaging, multi-tenant SaaS, and petabyte-scale analytics, built with sharded data stores, region-aware caches, and event-driven backplanes.
Reliability-first tactics such as graceful degradation, bulkhead isolation, and chaos testing that keep services resilient under peak load.
Cost-and-latency balancing strategies to weigh CAP choices, right-size cloud spend, and maintain a healthy total cost of ownership.
Observability blueprints — structured logging, high-cardinality metrics, and adaptive alerting — so you surface issues before users do.
Straightforward formulas for estimating storage, bandwidth, and compute — skills interviewers expect on every System Design problem.
A senior-caliber playbook for the 45–60-minute System Design interview — requirement clarification, ball-park sizing, trade-off analysis, and production validation.

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Developed by MAANG Engineers
Every Educative lesson is designed by a team of ex-MAANG software engineers and PhD computer science educators, and developed in consultation with developers and data scientists working at Meta, Google, and more. Our mission is to get you hands-on with the necessary skills to stay ahead in a constantly changing industry. No video, no fluff. Just interactive, project-based learning with personalized feedback that adapts to your goals and experience.

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