Design an IAM system for services and users

Q: Design an IAM system for services and users

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

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Question

System Design Prompt

Design an Identity and Access Management (IAM) system for an organization/platform.

The system must support:

Human users and service identities (workloads)
Authentication (who are you?) and authorization (what can you do?)
Managing permissions via roles/policies
Auditing and compliance reporting

Requirements

Multi-tenant support (multiple orgs/projects/accounts)
Fine-grained permissions (resource + action)
Temporary credentials for services (no long-lived secrets if possible)
API access control for internal microservices
Admin UI/CLI for managing users/roles/policies

Deliverables

Core data model (principals, resources, roles, policies)
AuthN/AuthZ flows and token format
Policy evaluation approach
Auditing, revocation, and key rotation
Key trade-offs and scaling considerations

Design an IAM system for services and users

System Design Prompt

Requirements

Deliverables

Solution

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