Design an Online Bookstore
Company: Databricks
Role: Software Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: hard
Interview Round: Onsite
Design an online bookstore platform. Customers should be able to search for books, view book details, add items to a cart, place orders, pay, and track order status. Sellers or publishers should be able to create listings, update prices, and manage inventory. Discuss the functional requirements, core services, data model, search, inventory consistency, order processing, scaling, and failure handling.
Quick Answer: This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design a scalable, fault-tolerant online bookstore by addressing service decomposition, functional requirements, data modeling, search, inventory consistency, order processing, and failure handling in a distributed environment.