Design an alert notification system

Q: Design an alert notification system

This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design scalable, resilient, multi-tenant real-time notification systems, exercising competencies in distributed systems architecture, API and data model design, reliability engineering, and operational monitoring.

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Question

Design a multi-tenant alert notification system for operational incidents.

Monitoring sources send events when checks fire or recover. Users can configure alert rules, routing policies, schedules, and escalation chains. The platform must notify the right responders through channels such as email, SMS, push notification, chat integrations, and phone calls.

Assume requirements such as:

support for millions of alert events per day
p95 time to first notification under 30 seconds
at-least-once notification delivery
deduplication and suppression of repeated alerts
escalation if an alert is not acknowledged
user preferences, quiet hours, and on-call rotations
retries and failover when external notification providers are down
audit logs and delivery analytics

Describe the APIs, data model, high-level architecture, critical workflows, failure handling, and scaling strategy.

Design an alert notification system

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