Design Publisher Configuration Rules
Company: Netflix
Role: Software Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: hard
Interview Round: Onsite
Design a supply-side advertising configuration system that manages publisher-specific rules.
A publisher may own many websites, mobile apps, channels, or ad placements. Each publisher may need custom configuration rules controlling inventory eligibility, ad formats, floor prices, demand partners, privacy requirements, blocking rules, and revenue-related settings.
The system should allow internal operators and publisher-facing tools to create, validate, version, deploy, and evaluate these rules.
Your design should cover:
- How to model publisher inventory.
- How to represent publisher-specific configuration rules.
- How rules inherit from higher-level entities and override defaults.
- How conflicts are resolved.
- How rules are evaluated during real-time ad requests.
- How to support auditability, safe rollout, testing, and rollback.
- APIs, storage, caching, validation, and monitoring.
Quick Answer: This question evaluates system design skills focused on configuration management and rule-based policy modeling for supply-side advertising platforms, covering inventory modeling, rule inheritance and overrides, conflict resolution, real-time evaluation, and operational controls like validation, versioning, rollout, and auditing.