System Design Space

Structured materials for system design interview preparation: from Big Tech hiring to key book overviews.

Learning Space

System Design
Mastery

DB

API

Scale

Автор

Alexander Polomodov

Difficulty:

Only chapters matching both the selected material type and the selected difficulty are shown.

Purpose of recruitment and approach to searching for candidates in different companieseasy

From hiring “for a team” to hiring “for a company”. Multi-stage selection and quality control.

Step-by-step recruitment process for a candidate (bigtech)easy

Recruitment screening, algorithmic interview, system design and behavioral interview.

Why is a system design interview needed in this process?easy

What the company evaluates and why the system design interview has become so important.

Discussion of frameworks for conducting/passing system design interviewseasy

Alex Xu's framework: four steps to a structured System Design Interview.

Approaches to conducting design interviewseasy

7-Step System Design Interview Framework and In-Depth Book List.

Specifics of designing different systems (backend, frontend, mobile, data, ml/ai)easy

RADIO for frontend, offline-first for mobile, Medallion for data, Feature Store for ML.

Interview assessment and difficulty variationeasy

Evaluation criteria for interview stages, grade levels and difficulty adaptation mechanism.

Recommendations for preparing for an interview (long term)easy

An in-depth analysis of preparation for each stage of the interview with recommendations of books and resources.

Recommendations for preparing for an interview (short term)easy

7-day plan, express framework, mock interview platforms and checklist for the day before the interview.

Troubleshooting Interviewmid

SRE interview format: incident diagnosis, RED Method, workaround vs root cause, evaluation criteria and comparison with System Design.

Example Troubleshooting Interviewmid

Public interview at DevOops 2023: analysis of the architecture of a fintech application, an incident with a reduction in payments, diagnostics in the Lead + Junior pair.

How the part about approaches to system design workseasy

Introductory chapter: Why know the different design approaches, how the section is structured, and how to use it as a learning route.

Design principles for scalable systemsmid

Scale Cube, CAP theorem, sharding, replication, caching, CQRS, persistence patterns.

Balancing algorithms: Round Robin, Least Connections, Consistent Hashingmid

Practical analysis of popular balancing algorithms, their trade-offs and recommendations for choosing for stateless/stateful loads.

Caching strategies: Cache-Aside, Read-Through, Write-Through, Write-Backmid

Practical analysis of the main cache patterns, latency/consistency trade-offs and choice of strategy for different workloads.

Replication and shardingmid

How to design replication and sharding: topologies, read/write path, rebalancing, hot shards, consistency and operational trade-offs.

Data Consistency Patterns and Idempotencymid

How to choose a consistency model and implement idempotency in APIs, event processing and background tasks.

Event-Driven Architecture: Event Sourcing, CQRS, Sagamid

Practical analysis of the event-driven approach: how to design event flows, when to use Event Sourcing and CQRS, and how to implement Saga for distributed transactions.

Fault Tolerance Patterns: Circuit Breaker, Bulkhead, Retrymid

Practical analysis of resilience patterns for distributed systems: how to limit cascading failures and manage service degradation.

API

DB

Cache

CDN

Queue

Load Balancer

Microservices

Why These Materials

Everything You Need to Grow Design Skills

A structured way to learn system design for both interviews and real production architecture work.

28 real-world case studies

Architecture breakdowns for Twitter, YouTube, Uber, and many other systems from scratch.

Architecture and Trade-offs

Diagrams, trade-offs, and explicit rationale behind each design.

Built by Practitioners

Content curated from public blogs, books, and technical sources with an engineering-first perspective.

Step-by-step Method

A practical framework for solving any system design task.

System Design Space

System DesignMastery

Big Tech Hiring Approaches

Purpose of recruitment and approach to searching for candidates in different companieseasy

Step-by-step recruitment process for a candidate (bigtech)easy

Why is a system design interview needed in this process?easy

Discussion of frameworks for conducting/passing system design interviewseasy

Approaches to conducting design interviewseasy

Specifics of designing different systems (backend, frontend, mobile, data, ml/ai)easy

Interview assessment and difficulty variationeasy

Recommendations for preparing for an interview (long term)easy

Recommendations for preparing for an interview (short term)easy

Troubleshooting Interviewmid

Example Troubleshooting Interviewmid

System Design Approaches

How the part about approaches to system design workseasy

Design principles for scalable systemsmid

Balancing algorithms: Round Robin, Least Connections, Consistent Hashingmid

Caching strategies: Cache-Aside, Read-Through, Write-Through, Write-Backmid

Replication and shardingmid

Data Consistency Patterns and Idempotencymid

Event-Driven Architecture: Event Sourcing, CQRS, Sagamid

Fault Tolerance Patterns: Circuit Breaker, Bulkhead, Retrymid

System Design Case Studies

System Design Sources and References

Software Architecture

Foundational Knowledge

Distributed Systems

Databases

Microservices and Integration

Cloud Native and Containerization

SRE and Operational Reliability

Security Engineering

AI/ML Engineering

Frontend Architecture