System Design Interview Roadmap

System Design Interview Roadmap

Home
Sponsor Systemdr
Subscribe Now
Hands-On courses
System Design Walkthrough
52 Question's Vault
About
Real-Time Recommendation Engines: The Architecture of TikTok’s “For You” Page
A user opens the app, watches a video for 1.4 seconds, and swipes away.
Design Tinder Matching — Walkthrough
Archetype: Marketplace & Matching · Asked at: Match Group, Bumble, Hinge
The difference between "Hire" and "Strong Hire"
After the trade-offs section, before the interviewer wraps up, there is a 2-minute move that upgrades a Hire to a Strong Hire more reliably than…
Designing for Hallucination Mitigation — Guardrails and Verification Layers
Section 9: AI & LLM Infrastructure
Design a Log Aggregation System (ELK/Splunk) — Walkthrough
Archetype: Infrastructure & Platform · Asked at: Elastic, Splunk, Datadog, FAANG-wide
Indexes: B-Tree, Hash, Composite, Covering
Indexes are the most commonly mentioned and least explained element in system design interviews.
AI Gateway Patterns: Rate Limiting and Cost Control for LLM APIs
A team at a mid-size fintech shipped a support-ticket summarizer in March.
Design a Distributed Task Queue (Celery/SQS) — Walkthrough
Archetype: Infrastructure & Platform · Asked at: Amazon, Shopify, Stripe
Handling Questions You Haven't Seen
You will get a question you haven’t drilled. This is guaranteed. The point of the question bank is pattern recognition, not memorization.
Multi-Modal System Design — Handling Text, Image, and Audio Simultaneously
A customer uploads a 40-second phone video of a leaking pipe and types “is this covered under my policy?” One request, three payloads: a text question…
Design Reddit’s Front Page — Walkthrough
The probe
The Hardest Question in the Question Bank
Of the 52 questions in the system design bank, one comes up in cohort feedback more than any other.
© 2026 SystemDR Inc · Privacy ∙ Terms ∙ Collection notice
Start your SubstackGet the app
Substack is the home for great culture