Systems Design Interviews
Bought a copy of designing data intensive applications — The book is quite comprehensive. For folks who conduct these types of interviews what level of detail are you looking for? Do I need to know the difference between SSTtables vs B-trees, or is it good enough to say, just index the kv pairs... It seems the interviewer has a lot of discretion on how to steer the interview — are you guys looking for some baseline knowledge across a variety of topics or can they just touch upon many things at a very cursory level?
Yes in one of the interviews I was driven deeper to the point of contrasting LSM Trees vs B-Trees and then designing one of them. I interviewed for Senior Level. So the answer to your question is YES, you would be expected to know the depth and breadth and it varies at what level you interview (senior vs junior vs principal)!
I highly recommend this https://github.com/donnemartin/system-design-primer I think the level of detail it goes would be enough for most interviews unless interviewer really wants dive deeper.