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Google System Design Interview Preparation

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 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 ability to discuss the tradeoffs and options ( i.e. Don’t just mention that you will use a database. Explain why you choose that? What are the alternative options? Talk through the options and explain why you’ve made that choice)

  • How do you productionize: Reliability and scale


How can I prepare for a system design interview?


  • Review distributed systems concepts

  • Consider the entire spectrum of requirement gathering: time, cost, throughput, users, latency, storage, etc

  • Think about: How would I determine what is a good latency? How robust and how scalable can it be? How do I productionize it and scale it in a manner that caters to the users?

  • Think about: How will you build a flexible design? What components will you keep variable, and what components will you set in stone?


Approach you can adopt for a system design interview


  1. Scope the requirements

    • Always ask clarifying questions! The problem statement will be incomplete, so ask for solid requirements

  2. Design the solution

    • Feel free to start with something simple!

    • Be flexible! Don’t be afraid to make changes on some of the designs you have laid out. Interviewer  might be giving you hints and guiding you in a certain direction.

  3. Deep Dive in sub-areas

  4. Iterate

    • Improve and adapt. Consider scalability, reliability, flexibility and maintainability

    • Always think about backup plans - On scalability, have you designed it in such a way that it can handle data center outage?


Useful resources


 

Other resources for practice/ refresher


Reading materials if you have time:



You might want to prepare on the following topics (not all will be assessed):


  • API design

  • Systems architecture

  • Capacity/ latency/ throughput

  • Scalability

  • Network Design

  • Fault tolerance

  • System level interactions and trade-offs

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