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.

What difficulty level is this interview question?

This is a medium difficulty System Design question, commonly asked during Take-home Project rounds at MathWorks.

What role is this question designed for?

This question is commonly asked for Software Engineer candidates at MathWorks during technical interviews.

Design a multi-tenant course purchase and delivery system

Quick Overview

This question evaluates a candidate's skills in designing scalable multi-tenant architectures, covering data modeling for tenants, organizations, and unique member identities, API design for purchasing and entitlements, access control and prerequisite enforcement, and trade-offs around consistency and high-read performance.

Design a multi-tenant online course purchasing and delivery system with the following requirements.

Domain model / requirements

There are multiple Companies (tenants).
Each company has multiple Organizations .
Each organization has multiple Members .
The platform hosts multiple Courses .
Each course can have prerequisites (other courses) that must be completed/owned before access.
Pricing differs by company depending on the company’s purchased plan/contract (same course may have different prices for different companies).
A company can buy courses on behalf of members inside an organization (e.g., assign seats/licenses).
New companies, organizations, and members may be created at any time.
Every member must have a system-wide unique Member ID .
You are given (or can assume existence of) a class definition object for a course and a function to query a course’s prerequisites.

What to design

Core APIs (creating companies/orgs/members, browsing courses, purchasing, assigning entitlements, checking access).
Data model (multi-tenancy, membership, purchases/entitlements, prerequisite representation).
High-level architecture and key services.
How course access is enforced (including prerequisite checks).
Scalability, consistency, and operational concerns (auditing, retries, idempotency).

Assume typical enterprise needs: high read volume for catalog/access checks, strict correctness for purchases, and reasonable latency for prerequisite queries.

Quick Overview

Domain model / requirements

There are multiple Companies (tenants).

Each company has multiple Organizations .

Each organization has multiple Members .

The platform hosts multiple Courses .

Each course can have prerequisites (other courses) that must be completed/owned before access.

Pricing differs by company depending on the company’s purchased plan/contract (same course may have different prices for different companies).

A company can buy courses on behalf of members inside an organization (e.g., assign seats/licenses).

New companies, organizations, and members may be created at any time.

Every member must have a system-wide unique Member ID .

You are given (or can assume existence of) a class definition object for a course and a function to query a course’s prerequisites.

What to design

Core APIs (creating companies/orgs/members, browsing courses, purchasing, assigning entitlements, checking access).

Data model (multi-tenancy, membership, purchases/entitlements, prerequisite representation).

High-level architecture and key services.

How course access is enforced (including prerequisite checks).

Scalability, consistency, and operational concerns (auditing, retries, idempotency).

Assume typical enterprise needs: high read volume for catalog/access checks, strict correctness for purchases, and reasonable latency for prerequisite queries.

Design a multi-tenant course purchase and delivery system

Quick Overview

Domain model / requirements

What to design

Solution

Comments (0)

Design a multi-tenant course purchase and delivery system

Quick Overview

Domain model / requirements

What to design

Solution

Comments (0)