Explain and diagram your past system architecture

Q: Explain and diagram your past system architecture

This question evaluates a candidate's proficiency in system architecture and operational ownership through a whiteboard-style walkthrough of a production system, focusing on requirements decomposition, high-level components, data and control flows, storage and scalability choices, resiliency patterns, deployment topology, and trade-off reasoning.

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Question

System Design Walkthrough: Architecture You Have Built/Owned

Provide a whiteboard-style walkthrough of a production system you have personally built or owned. Include:

Problem and requirements (functional and non-functional, SLAs/SLOs)
High-level architecture and main components
Data flows and control flows (end-to-end)
Storage choices and data models
Scaling strategies (compute, storage, and concurrency)
Resiliency patterns (failover, retries, backpressure, idempotency)
Deployment/DevOps topology (environments, CI/CD, observability, IaC)
Key trade-offs and technology selections (with rationale)
How the design evolved over time (v1 → vN, and why)

If you cannot disclose specifics, present an equivalent system (e.g., a document preview/thumbnail pipeline, notifications, or search indexing) and keep details non-proprietary.

Explain and diagram your past system architecture

System Design Walkthrough: Architecture You Have Built/Owned

Solution

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Explain and diagram your past system architecture

Overview

System Design Walkthrough: Architecture You Have Built/Owned

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