Deep dive a project's architecture

Q: Deep dive a project's architecture

This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design and articulate end-to-end system architecture, including components, data flow, scalability, reliability, security, observability, and operational trade-offs, thereby assessing architectural thinking, system ownership, and technical justification skills.

Q: How do I approach System Design interview questions?

System Design questions require understanding of core concepts and practice. PracHub provides solutions with explanations to help you master system design interviews.

Question

System Design Deep Dive: Past Project

Provide a deep dive on one production project you owned or co-built. Assume the audience has not seen your system before. You may anonymize proprietary details. ASCII diagrams are acceptable.

Deliverables

Architecture diagram
- Components, data stores, and interfaces (APIs, events, contracts).
Data flow and key invariants
- End-to-end request/event flow; call out the invariants that must always hold.
Technology choices
- Justify major choices and trade-offs.
Scalability and performance
- Expected load, bottlenecks, and how you scale horizontally/vertically.
Consistency and reliability
- Consistency model, failure handling, retries, idempotency, backpressure.
Security and access control
- Authentication, authorization, secrets, encryption.
Observability
- Logs, metrics, traces, alerting, and top SLIs.
SLAs/SLOs
- Target latencies, availability, and error budgets.
Incident or trade-off
- A significant incident or trade-off you handled, with root cause and remediation.
Redesign

What you would change today and why.

Tip: Be concrete with APIs, schemas, and SLOs; highlight the risks you mitigated and the ones you consciously accepted.

Deep dive a project's architecture

System Design Deep Dive: Past Project

Deliverables

Solution

Comments (0)

Deep dive a project's architecture

Overview

System Design Deep Dive: Past Project

Deliverables

Solution

Comments (0)