Design Emergency Notification System
Company: Fora Travel
Role: Software Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Onsite
Design a disaster or emergency notification system for an organization such as a city government, university, or large company.
The system should allow authorized operators to create urgent alerts and deliver them to affected recipients through multiple channels such as mobile push notification, SMS, email, voice call, and web banner. Alerts may target users by geography, organization group, subscription preference, or incident type.
Discuss the requirements, APIs, data model, high-level architecture, delivery workflow, scaling strategy, reliability guarantees, failure handling, security, and monitoring.
Quick Answer: This question evaluates system design and engineering competencies related to large-scale, real-time notification systems, including distributed systems architecture, messaging and delivery mechanisms, data modeling, API design, scalability, reliability, security, and monitoring.