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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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Overview

Content

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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.

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.

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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Personalized Interview Prep

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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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