Design and explain your project architecture

Q: Design and explain your project architecture

This is a System Design interview question from TikTok for Software Engineer roles. View the full question and solution on PracHub.

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Question

System Design Walkthrough: Short-Video Upload, Processing, and Delivery

Context

You recently built a system that lets users upload short videos, processes them into adaptive-bitrate streams, performs safety/moderation, and serves them at scale via a CDN. Present a high-level architecture and explain how it meets product and operational requirements.

Deliverables

High-level architecture diagram (ASCII/block diagram is fine).
Walkthrough of:
- Components and data stores
- Key APIs and data flows (sync vs. async; protocols)
- Scaling strategy and capacity planning
- Fault tolerance, backpressure, idempotency, retries
- Observability (logging, metrics, tracing)
- Security (authN/authZ, secrets, PII)
- Major trade-offs and cost considerations
- Concrete improvements you would make next

Be prepared for deep dives into specific components (e.g., upload resumability, transcoder autoscaling, or moderation latency).

Design and explain your project architecture

System Design Walkthrough: Short-Video Upload, Processing, and Delivery

Context

Deliverables

Solution (Locked)

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