SEE ALSO: The PEDALS™ Framework for System Design Questions
System design (SD) questions test one’s ability to build software systems from scratch. Here are some examples:
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Design an API for a payment provider.
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Design an order inventory system.
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Design a question and answer website like Quora.
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Create a back-end system that created unique IDs.
Who is likely to get a system design question?
Software engineers and software architects are most likely to get system design questions. Other roles can get SD questions including:
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Product Managers
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Technical Program Managers
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QA Testers
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Data Scientists
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Data Engineers
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Support Engineers
What are interviewers looking for in a system design interview?
Software engineers and architects are most likely to get system design (SD) questions. However, the following folks get SD questions too:
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Product Managers
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Technical Program Managers
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QA Testers
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Data Scientists
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Data Engineers
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Support Engineers
SD questions appear at the interview because the roles above play a big part in building software systems that scale. Unlike the pre-Internet era, a modern application must work across thousands of servers, ready to serve millions and perhaps billions of users.
Interviewers love SD questions because it tests a candidate’s ability to:
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Specify system requirements clearly
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Articulate the desired system behavior
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Specify constraints
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Contribute to technical brainstorming
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Point out technical drawbacks
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Decide between technical tradeoffs
As a result, during the SD question, the interviewer wants you to specify:
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The key services, preferably in RESTful API format
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Define the data model
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Define the cloud architecture, with an emphasis on scale