Tech-specific interview prep
System Design Interview Questions and Evaluation Rubrics
Practice system design through requirements, scale, interfaces, data, reliability, observability, and explicit tradeoffs.
Best for: Mid-level through staff software engineers preparing for architecture interviews.
What to prepare
- Requirements
- Capacity
- APIs and data
- Reliability
- Tradeoff communication
Practice with a rubric
System Design interview questions and strong-answer signals
Answer each question aloud before opening the rubric. The goal is not a single perfect answer; it is clear reasoning grounded in production constraints.
- 1
Design a notification system supporting email, push, and SMS at global scale.
What this tests
Requirements, fan-out, preferences, delivery semantics, and provider failure.
Strong-answer signals
- ✓Clarifies urgency and ordering
- ✓Separates orchestration from providers
- ✓Handles retries, deduplication, and observability
- 2
Design an audit-log platform for regulated customers.
What this tests
Immutability, access control, retention, search, and evidence integrity.
Strong-answer signals
- ✓Defines threat model
- ✓Separates write path from indexing
- ✓Explains retention and tenant isolation
- 3
Design a feature-flag service used on every request.
What this tests
Read latency, consistency, rollout safety, and control plane separation.
Strong-answer signals
- ✓Optimizes the data plane
- ✓Defines cache invalidation
- ✓Handles kill switches and stale configuration
- 4
How do you decide which component to scale first?
What this tests
Capacity estimation and bottleneck identification.
Strong-answer signals
- ✓Uses expected workload
- ✓Identifies critical resources
- ✓Includes load testing and cost
From guide to deliberate practice
Build a role-specific mock interview
Add the real job description to generate technical, behavioral, collaboration, and execution questions calibrated to the opportunity.
Frequently asked questions
What should I study for a System Design interview?
Prioritize Requirements, Capacity, APIs and data, Reliability, Tradeoff communication. Connect each concept to production decisions, failure modes, and work you can explain from direct experience.
How should I use the strong-answer signals?
Use them as a self-review checklist after answering aloud. They are not a script and strong solutions can take different approaches when their tradeoffs are explicit.
Should I memorize these answers?
No. Practice a repeatable reasoning process: clarify requirements, state assumptions, compare options, choose deliberately, and explain how you would verify the result.