System Design Interview Prep: A Developer's Guide
System design interviews test your ability to think at scale. Here's how to prepare and common questions to practice.
System design interviews assess your ability to architect scalable, reliable, and maintainable systems. They're a critical component of the interview process for mid-level and senior engineering roles. Unlike coding interviews that test specific algorithms, system design interviews evaluate your holistic understanding of software architecture.
Core topics to study
Distributed systems fundamentals (CAP theorem, consistency models), database design (SQL vs NoSQL, sharding, replication), caching strategies (CDN, Redis, Memcached), load balancing, API design (REST, GraphQL, gRPC), and messaging systems (Kafka, SQS, RabbitMQ).
Common system design questions
Practice designing: Twitter/X (news feed, tweet delivery), Uber (ride matching, ETA calculation), WhatsApp (real-time messaging), YouTube (video processing, streaming), and URL shortener (key generation, redirect). For each, focus on requirements gathering, high-level design, deep dives into specific components, and trade-off analysis.
MR
Maria Rodriguez
Head of Engineering
Maria leads engineering at DevPass. She's a former staff engineer at GitHub and has interviewed over 500 candidates.
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