I have a product design round coming up as part of my full loop for SWE role. I've searched through Blind and understand that product design focuses on API design, DB schema and yes, high level design but not necessarily dig into infra details like sharding, availability etc. What kind of tradeoffs can we discuss around API design and DB schema? Most prep material focus on CAP tradeoffs, shard keys and cache invalidation etc so I wanted to see if you guys had some more insight here. I'm struggling to think about tradeoffs at the API layer, most feel like certain conventions and standards that REST follows. DB schema tradeoffs could be choice of PK, FK and making sure product queries are serviceable by the schema but can't think of more beyond this TC - 180K, 2.5yoe #meta #systemdesign #interview #productdesign
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Congrats on getting to the on-site. How many weeks out do the recruiter lets you schedule the on-site?
can take as much time as you need, I scheduled mine 2 weeks out after tech screen results
Talk briefly about the tradeoffs between REST and RPC. Talk in depth about the tradeoffs of the specific response sizes and content. E.g. Does your api return everything, or does it return a small amount of data and you need multiple requests to fill out the scenario. For 'real time' info, talk about the trade offs between polling, web sockets and sse. Pro tip: always mention the system should be configurable to switch between these states if appropriate. Talk about the impact your design will have on HTTP caching. Talk about various pagination approaches and their trade offs. Talk about the trade offs between supporting all client types with a single API or using client specific ones. If you understand and practise the above you'll be fine for the API section.
this is gold, thank you so much for taking the time :)
Hey OP, how did it go? Any tips?
Hey OP, how did the interview go?
What role did you apply for? Did you get to pick product or infra design?
SWE, product. I chose product design since I don't have much experience building distributed systems