System design practice
Production-grade architecture drills designed for Principal and Staff Engineers (L6+). Every problem is framed with explicit Functional Requirements (FR), Non-Functional Requirements (NFR), and deep-dive discussion prompts.
Functional requirements (FR)
- Add functional requirements here.
Non-functional requirements (NFR)
- Add non‑functional requirements here.
Practice moving from ambiguous requirements to production-grade architectures. In Principal and Staff Engineer interviews, the differentiator is not memorized diagrams—it is how you shape requirements, reason through trade-offs, and design for operational reality.
Core Topics & Reference Material
Design a Global Feature Flag Platform
Principal-level prompt about safe, low-latency configuration delivery across many services and regions.
Design a Global Rate-Limiting Platform
Principal-level prompt about enforcing customer and service quotas across regions without a central request-path dependency.
Design a Durable Workflow Orchestrator
Principal-level prompt about coordinating long-running business processes across unreliable services.
Design a Multi-Tenant Event Ingestion Platform
Principal-level prompt about accepting, validating, routing, and retaining high-volume events from many producers.
Design a Shared Observability Platform
Principal-level prompt about collecting logs, metrics, and traces across teams while controlling cost and protecting sensitive data.
Design a Global Identity and Authorization Platform
Principal-level prompt about identity, authorization, and policy distribution across products and regions.
Design a Flash Sale & Inventory Reservation System
Principal-level prompt about handling extreme hot-spot inventory contention without overselling, deadlocks, or database exhaustion.
Design a Multi-Currency Payment Gateway & Ledger
Principal-level prompt about idempotent payment capture, double-entry financial ledgers, and automated reconciliation across unstable payment rails.
Design a Distributed Job Scheduler & Cron Engine
Principal-level prompt about dispatching millions of delayed and recurring jobs with high precision, worker lease fencing, and tenant fairness.
Design Instamart (Quick Commerce 10-Minute Delivery)
Principal-level prompt about dark store inventory synchronization, real-time geo-fencing, picker route optimization, and dynamic delivery SLA tracking.
Design a Proximity Search & Nearby Places Platform
Principal-level prompt about spatial indexing, boundary queries, and high-frequency vehicle coordinate ingestion at global scale.
Design a Real-Time Collaborative Document Platform
Principal-level prompt about conflict-free concurrent editing, operational transformation vs CRDTs, presence broadcasting, and snapshot compaction.
Design a Distributed Key-Value Store
Principal-level prompt about building a masterless distributed storage engine with consistent hashing, tunable quorum consistency, and anti-entropy repair.
Design a Multi-Channel Notification Platform
Principal-level prompt about dispatching high-volume transactional and marketing alerts across Push, SMS, and Email with carrier circuit breakers and preference routing.
Design a Global URL Shortener with Real-Time Analytics
Principal-level prompt about sub-15ms edge redirects, collision-free distributed ID allocation, and streaming telemetry aggregation at scale.
Design a Video Ingestion, Transcoding & Streaming Platform
Principal-level prompt about parallel chunked video transcoding, adaptive bitrate streaming (HLS/DASH), and multi-tier CDN edge caching.