System Design Walkthrough: Project You Owned
Context: In an onsite system design interview for a Software Engineer role, you are asked to walk through a recent project you owned end-to-end. If you cannot share proprietary details, use a representative, sanitized example.
Your walkthrough should cover:
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Functional requirements
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Non-functional requirements (SLOs, latency, durability, security, cost)
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High-level architecture (services, data stores, messaging)
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Data flows (ingest, process, store, query)
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Scaling strategies and capacity planning
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Consistency vs. availability trade-offs (and why)
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Schema/data modeling choices
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Performance bottlenecks and optimizations
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Failure handling and resilience
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Observability, SLOs, and operations
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Key design decisions and alternatives considered (and trade-offs)
Be explicit about assumptions, constraints, and how you validated the design (load tests, chaos, data correctness).