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System design interview guide for Software Engineers

The objective of system design interviews is to evaluate a candidate's skill at designing real-world software systems involving multiple components. System design questions are typically given to more senior candidates (with a few years of experience). Interns aren't typically given system design questions as it is hard to expect interns to have sufficient and relevant industry experience to answer this type of questions well.

Some common questions include:

  • Design a URL shortener (e.g. Bitly)
  • Design a social media website (e.g. Twitter)
  • Design a video watching website (e.g. YouTube)
  • Design a chatting service (e.g. Telegram, Slack, Discord)
  • Design a file sharing service (e.g. Google Drive, Dropbox)
  • Design a ride sharing service (e.g. Uber, Lyft)
  • Design a photo sharing service (e.g. Flickr, Pinterest)
  • Design an e-commerce website (e.g. Amazon, eBay)
  • Design a jobs portal (e.g. LinkedIn, Indeed)
  • Design a web crawler (e.g. Google)
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System design content is still work-in-progress, but the following are some resources to help you in the meanwhile.

Quality courses​

  • ByteByteGo - This is a new System Design course by Alex Xu, author of the System Design Interview books, a bestseller on Amazon. The course covers system designs basics, then goes into deep dives of the design of over 10 famous common products (e.g. Designing YouTube, Facebook Newsfeed, etc) and multiple big data and storage systems (e.g. Designing a Chat System). For each deep dive, concepts are explained and comprehensive diagrams are used, making it very approachable regardless of seniority level.
  • "Grokking the System Design Interview" by Design Gurus - This is probably the most famous system design interview course on the internet and what makes it different from most other courses out there is that it is purely text-based, which is great for people who refer reading over watching videos (such as myself!). It contains a repository of the popular system design problems along with a glossary of system design basics. I've personally completed this course and highly recommended many others to use this.
  • "Grokking the Advanced System Design Interview" by Design Gurus - I haven't tried this but it's by the same people who created "Grokking the System Design Interview", so it should be good! In my opinion you probably wouldn't need this unless you're very senior or going for a specialist position.
  • "Best of System Design" package by Design Gurus - This bundle allows you to purchase both System Design interview courses by Design Gurus at a discount. Best of all, it's lifetime and not subscription-based.
  • "System Design Interview Course" by Exponent - This course covers system designs basics and has a huge database of popular system design questions with videos of mock interviews. Some of the questions have text answers and a database schema and APIs for reference (which I find helpful). While the subscription might be a little pricey for just the system design interviews content, they also offer quality technical content for Data Structures, Algorithms and Behavioral Interviews. The convenience of a one-stop platform which covers all aspects of technical interview preparation is very enticing.

Free resources​

  • System Design Primer - Most comprehensive resource on system design out there. Recommended only if you have a ton of time to spare.
  • System Design Interview - Contains many links to tips about system design, system design-related topics and engineering blogs of famous companies.
  • System Design Cheatsheet - Brief and concise content. Serves as a good revision right before your system design interview.

Books​

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