Azam's Blog on System Design & Architecture

  What is a system design interview? You would be asked a question to design a solution to a real world engineering problem It can cover anything from large service architecture (gmail or gmaps), to algorithms, to hardware constraints. It’ll be more of a conversation with you taking the lead - if you have in depth knowledge of a certain area, take the opportunity to showcase your depth of knowledge to the interviewer What are our interviewers looking out for? Your ability to provide a concrete, realistic and quantitative design (i.e. Does your design work for that problem? You might have to go into specific details like numbers - i.e. numbers of machines required, possible queries per second, etc) Your ability to implement API and interface design (i.e. whether its easy to use and works well with other teams in the organization, or with existing parts of the system) Your ability to discuss the properties of the system (i.e. Given a certain architecture, does it favor latency?) Your abi