Google System design interview

Amazon
Frowu77

Go to company page Amazon

Frowu77
Jul 2, 2019 11 Comments

Have an upcoming onsite at GCP.

Any tips for system design rounds? Are questions like Design Facebook or are they like more specific?

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TOP 11 Comments
  • Unfortunately all the ones u see on the web are not asked. Is it an NALSD or just system design. If former, u need to also cover capacity planning, including estimating how many servers, disks, etc. Also estimate rough cost. For both, first get all use cases/features down, next start with a "hello world" equivalent and make sure you solve all use cases. Depending on the interviewer you may need to offer rest API signatures, DB table design, etc. After that, they will jump on scale stuff ... My recommendation is to talk about at least 85% of the scale items like handling large transactions, sharding DB, etc. Then deliberately think aloud about the remaining 15% and solve them of course. There are things you will not be able to cover like security, politeness protocol (if applicable), etc., Draw a small box in the corner of the board and note them, if u have time cover them otherwise the interviewer will at least know u thought about it.

    Some of the questions I've seen ... Service to ingest and serve a trillion k/v pairs, execute several tasks that have billion+ steps, etc. Everything u see in every prep site is a banned question. But still go over them so they give you the framework to solve them. The github primer is a good one. Also do not propose using any product u know, u are required to build. DB, load balancers, etc., Only things like DNS resolvers are allowed.

    Good luck!
    Jul 2, 2019 2
    • Uber
      brosafari

      Go to company page Uber

      brosafari
      Can you not use a load balancer or use a DB like Hbase or do you have to design everything from scratch? That sounds like a lot to cover in 45 min
      Jun 5, 2020
    • Wow an old thread... Anyway the reason why they don't accept off the shelf stuff is because they want to know whether you know what a load balancer does, have a reasonable understanding of the internals of the database, etc. E.g., how will you route traffic with the load balancer, round robin, geographic, etc? Most modern DB take care of things sharding but you still need to know which key to use, cluster deployment architecture etc. Obviously, you not going to create any of these products when you join, but you must know the fundamentals of scaling large systems.

      This is the reason why just simply reviewing Grokking the system design or other stuff on the web won't be enough. And why SD interviews are tricky 😟
      Jun 6, 2020
  • Booking.com / Other
    Punani

    Go to company page Booking.com Other

    BIO
    🤬🤪🥴🥺🤫😜🤦‍♂️
    Punani
    Clarify and narrow the scope first. Keep thinking of potential new problems in the design. And never say you don't know how to improve your design. There are always problems in every system.
    Jul 2, 2019 0
  • SAP
    kaziwada

    Go to company page SAP

    kaziwada
    Check the systems design primer on github. That’s good resource. Beyond that it is hard to predict what they would ask.
    Jul 2, 2019 0
  • New / Data
    kSSE06

    New Data

    PRE
    Albertsons
    kSSE06
    I think you can get both. Hopefully this can help:
    https://www.rooftopslushie.com/request/Google-System-design-interviews-156
    Good luck!
    Jul 2, 2019 0