Master System Design (Senior Level)
12 weeks · 0 milestones
Design 10 production-grade systems from scratch, covering scalability, reliability, and trade-offs — peer-reviewed by senior engineers.
Milestone map
Milestone map
3 milestones
Choose a real system design problem — a URL shortener handling 10 billion clicks/month, a ride-sharing dispatch backend, a rate-limiting service for an API gateway, or a time-series metrics store — and produce a full system design document. Cover: functional and non-functional requirements, back-of-envelope capacity estimation, a component architecture diagram, the choice of data stores (with justification), consistency and availability trade-offs under CAP, and at least two design alternatives with their trade-offs compared.
Proof required
System design document (800+ words) covering requirements, capacity estimation, component architecture diagram, data store choices with justification, CAP trade-offs, and two alternative designs with explicit comparison.
What gets checked
- Capacity estimation uses real numbers (QPS, storage per record, network bandwidth) — not 'it needs to scale'
- Data store choices are justified by access patterns — not 'use Postgres for relational data'
- Two genuine alternative designs are compared with explicit trade-offs — not variations of the same architecture