System Design

The mental models and vocabulary every design conversation assumes. Start here before touching any component.

How bytes actually move between machines. Underpins every distributed design decision.

The contract between clients and services. Interviewers expect clean, evolvable interfaces.

Where state lives. Choosing and modeling the right store is the heart of most designs.

Trading freshness for speed. Caches appear in nearly every scalable design.

Pushing content and compute close to users for global low latency.

Distributing requests across servers while keeping traffic healthy and balanced.

The theory that explains why distributed systems behave the way they do. Staff interviews probe this deeply.

Splitting and copying data to scale beyond one machine while surviving failures.

Decoupling producers from consumers for resilience, scale, and event-driven design.

Proven structural approaches for organizing services and data flows.

Designing systems that degrade gracefully and recover from inevitable failures.

Protecting data and access. Increasingly expected in senior design discussions.

You cannot operate what you cannot see. Strong candidates design for visibility from day one.

Serving queries and crunching data at scale — common in design prompts.

Specialized structures that power large systems efficiently.

A repeatable structure to drive any design interview with confidence.

Practice on the classic prompts. Each rehearses patterns from earlier sections end to end.