Design chat and online chess
Company: Microsoft
Role: Machine Learning Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Onsite
Design two large-scale consumer systems:
1. A workplace messaging platform similar to Slack. It should support organizations, channels, direct messages, message history, notifications, file attachments, presence, and search.
2. An online chess platform similar to chess.com. It should support user accounts, matchmaking, live games, move validation, chess clocks, player ratings, spectating, chat, and game history.
For each system, discuss requirements, APIs, data model, high-level architecture, storage choices, scaling strategy, real-time communication, consistency model, and major trade-offs.
Quick Answer: This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design large-scale, real-time consumer systems, testing competencies in scalable architecture, data modeling, API design, storage selection, consistency models, real-time communication, and trade-off analysis.