Design RSS Feed and Temporary Mail

Company: Confluent

Role: Software Engineer

Category: System Design

Difficulty: medium

Interview Round: Onsite

Quick Answer: This question evaluates skills in large-scale system design, covering API design, ingestion and normalization pipelines, caching and freshness trade-offs, versioning and backward compatibility, client-specific payload strategies, scalability and deduplication for alias generation, and the use of probabilistic data structures for temporary email services. It is commonly asked to assess architecture-level trade-offs and operational concerns such as performance, storage, consistency and abuse prevention; the domain is System Design and the level of abstraction spans both conceptual architectural reasoning and practical application-level considerations.