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System Design Interview Mastery

From vague architecture answers to staff-level trade-off thinking.

A premium system design curriculum that builds a reusable framework for requirements, APIs, HLD, LLD, scaling, and failure-mode reasoning.

105 lessons•11 modules•1393 min
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Designed for

Backend engineers preparing for senior, staff, and architecture rounds.

What you unlock

  • A reusable system design answer framework for ambiguous prompts
  • Clear language for consistency, scaling, and reliability trade-offs
  • Case-study depth across feeds, payments, storage, and messaging systems

Curriculum Map

A structured path that feels worth paying for

Every module is ordered to build confidence, not just collect content. Start with the right fundamentals, deepen into the mechanics, then pressure-test your thinking with realistic engineering trade-offs.

Module 1

0. The Master Roadmap

1 lessons•11 min
1

Complete System Design Interview Preparation Roadmap

Beginner • 11 min read

Module 2

1. Core Fundamentals

1 lessons•10 min
1

System Design Module 2: The Interview Framework (PEDAL)

Beginner • 10 min read

Module 3

2. Scalability & Traffic

1 lessons•8 min
1

Cache Invalidation Patterns: TTL, Write-Through, Cache-Aside, and Event-Driven Eviction

Intermediate • 8 min read

Module 4

3. Storage & Data

4 lessons•29 min
1

System Design Module 6: Database Design (SQL vs NoSQL)

Medium • 5 min read

2

Database Scaling Part 2: Partitioning vs. Sharding

Advanced • 4 min read

3

Database Sharding Part 3: The Shard Key Blueprint

Advanced • 7 min read

4

System Design: Designing a Distributed BLOB Store (like S3/GCS)

Advanced • 13 min read

Module 5

4. Distributed Theory

6 lessons•68 min
1

System Design Module 8: CAP Theorem & Consistency Models

Hard • 6 min read

2

System Design Module 10: API Design & Rate Limiting

Intermediate • 14 min read

3

Microservices Are Overrated for Most Startups

Intermediate • 10 min read

4

Building Production Observability with OpenTelemetry and Grafana Stack

Advanced • 13 min read

5

System Design: Building a Highly Available Authorization Service (RBAC/ABAC/Zanzibar)

Advanced • 13 min read

6

Designing for 99.999% Availability: The Five Nines Blueprint

Advanced • 12 min read

Module 6

5. API & Communication

4 lessons•52 min
1

Pagination at Scale: Keyset vs Offset

Advanced • 12 min read

2

Idempotency Keys in APIs: Retries, Duplicate Requests, and Exactly-Once Illusions

Advanced • 13 min read

3

gRPC vs REST vs GraphQL: Choosing the Right API Protocol

Advanced • 12 min read

4

WebSocket and SSE for Real-Time Systems: Architecture and Production Patterns

Advanced • 15 min read

Module 7

6. Distributed Patterns

13 lessons•169 min
1

Distributed Deadlock Detection: Wait-For-Graphs

Advanced • 12 min read

2

Graceful Degradation: Feature Shedding

Advanced • 12 min read

3

Beyond CAP: The PACELC Theorem for Distributed Databases

Beginner • 14 min read

4

The Saga Pattern: Managing Distributed Transactions in NoSQL

Beginner • 11 min read

5

System Design: Distributed Transactions (2PC and 3PC)

Advanced • 11 min read

6

System Design: Managing Distributed Transactions with the Saga Pattern

Advanced • 16 min read

7

System Design: Multi-Leader Database Replication

Advanced • 12 min read

8

System Design: Designing an Event Mesh (Pub/Sub at Global Scale)

Advanced • 17 min read

9

Transactional Outbox Pattern: Reliable Event Publishing Without Dual Writes

Advanced • 14 min read

10

Designing a Retry System Without Causing a Retry Storm

Advanced • 12 min read

11

Feature Flags and Progressive Delivery: Safe Releases at Scale

Advanced • 12 min read

12

Designing Idempotent Payment Systems in Distributed Architecture

Advanced • 13 min read

13

Service Mesh with Istio: mTLS, Traffic Management, and Observability

Advanced • 13 min read

Module 8

7. Design Case Studies

33 lessons•475 min
1

System Design: Designing a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Advanced • 15 min read

2

System Design: Designing a Distributed ID Generator (Snowflake)

Advanced • 13 min read

3

System Design: Designing an Object Store (Amazon S3 Internals)

Advanced • 14 min read

4

System Design: Designing a Content Moderation System (Meta/TikTok Scale)

Advanced • 14 min read

5

System Design: Designing a Real-Time Ad Click Aggregator

Advanced • 19 min read

6

System Design: Designing Airbnb (Hotel/Home Booking)

Advanced • 14 min read

7

System Design: Designing a Collaborative Editor (Google Docs)

Advanced • 23 min read

8

System Design: Designing a Digital Wallet and Ledger System

Advanced • 14 min read

9

System Design: Designing an E-commerce Checkout System

Advanced • 19 min read

10

System Design: Designing a Food Delivery App (Uber Eats / DoorDash)

Advanced • 15 min read

11

System Design: Designing a Real-time Gaming Leaderboard (Massive Scale)

Advanced • 12 min read

12

System Design: Designing Nearby Friends (Real-time Geospatial Streams)

Advanced • 12 min read

13

System Design: Designing an Online Auction System (eBay Scale)

Advanced • 14 min read

14

System Design: Designing a Proximity Service (Yelp/Google Maps)

Advanced • 14 min read

15

System Design: Designing a Real-time Bidding (RTB) Ad System

Beginner • 16 min read

16

System Design: Designing a Stock Trading Platform and Matching Engine

Advanced • 14 min read

17

System Design: Designing Ticketmaster (High-Concurrency Booking)

Advanced • 12 min read

18

System Design: Designing Twitter (Timeline and News Feed)

Advanced • 11 min read

19

System Design: Designing a Web Crawler at Google Scale

Advanced • 15 min read

20

System Design: Designing a Video Conferencing System (Zoom / MS Teams)

Advanced • 19 min read

21

System Design: Building an Inventory Reservation System

Advanced • 13 min read

22

System Design: Building a Data Export Platform

Advanced • 14 min read

23

System Design: Building an Email Delivery Platform

Advanced • 18 min read

24

System Design: Building a File Upload Platform

Advanced • 13 min read

25

System Design: Building a Distributed Job Scheduler

Advanced • 13 min read

26

System Design: Building an Audit Log System for Compliance and Debugging

Advanced • 12 min read

27

Designing a High-Throughput Notification System for 100K Events per Second

Advanced • 12 min read

28

System Design: Video Streaming Platform at Netflix Scale

Advanced • 13 min read

29

System Design: Real-Time Chat Application at Scale

Advanced • 12 min read

30

System Design: Search Autocomplete at Google Scale

Advanced • 11 min read

31

System Design: Designing Multi-Region Active-Active Shopping Carts

Advanced • 15 min read

32

System Design: Designing Google Maps (Navigation and ETA)

Advanced • 15 min read

33

System Design: Designing an Online Judge (LeetCode/HackerRank)

Advanced • 15 min read

Module 9

8. Infrastructure & Platforms

29 lessons•394 min
1

API Design: REST vs GraphQL vs gRPC — When to Use Each

Advanced • 10 min read

2

API Rate Limiting at Scale: Redis-Based Strategies

Advanced • 10 min read

3

Cloud-Native Databases: Why the Log is the Database

Advanced • 15 min read

4

Distributed Data Observability: Metrics That Actually Matter

Advanced • 13 min read

5

System Design: Data Partitioning and Sharding Strategies

Advanced • 12 min read

6

System Design: Designing a Database Proxy for Sharding (Vitess Style)

Advanced • 14 min read

7

System Design: Designing a Distributed File Lock (Zookeeper/Curator)

Advanced • 13 min read

8

System Design: Designing a Distributed File System (HDFS/GCS Style)

Advanced • 11 min read

9

System Design: Designing a Local-First Key-Value Store (LevelDB/RocksDB)

Advanced • 13 min read

10

System Design: Designing a Distributed Lock Manager

Advanced • 13 min read

11

System Design: Designing a Scalable GraphQL API Gateway

Advanced • 11 min read

12

System Design: Designing a Distributed ID Generation Service

Advanced • 12 min read

13

System Design: Designing a Metrics Monitoring and Alerting System

Advanced • 20 min read

14

System Design: Designing a Pub/Sub Messaging Platform

Advanced • 13 min read

15

The Shadow Database Pattern

Advanced • 12 min read

16

Project Case Study: Designing Stripe’s Ledger System

Advanced • 12 min read

17

System Design: Building a Distributed Tracing Platform

Advanced • 12 min read

18

System Design: Building a Service Discovery Platform

Advanced • 17 min read

19

System Design: Building a Session Management Platform

Advanced • 12 min read

20

System Design: Building a Workflow Orchestration Platform

Advanced • 21 min read

21

System Design: Building a Distributed Configuration Platform

Advanced • 13 min read

22

System Design: Building a Payment Reconciliation Engine

Advanced • 14 min read

23

System Design: Building a Search Indexing Platform

Advanced • 13 min read

24

System Design: Building a Metrics Platform Like Prometheus

Advanced • 13 min read

25

System Design: Building a Secrets Management Platform

Advanced • 12 min read

26

System Design: Building a Usage Metering and Billing Platform

Advanced • 13 min read

27

System Design: Building a Webhook Delivery Platform

Advanced • 18 min read

28

Multi-Region Architecture: Active-Active, Active-Passive, and Consistency Trade-Offs

Advanced • 14 min read

29

Multi-Tenancy Architecture: Database, Application, and Infrastructure Patterns

Advanced • 18 min read

Module 10

Bonus Content

1 lessons•13 min
1

Bonus: The Ultimate System Design Cheatsheet

Beginner • 13 min read

Module 11

Case Studies (Master-tier)

12 lessons•164 min
1

Case Study: Design Instagram (Photo Sharing)

Advanced • 12 min read

2

Case Study: Design a Notification System

Intermediate • 11 min read

3

System Design: Designing a Distributed Search Engine (Elasticsearch)

Advanced • 13 min read

4

System Design: Designing a Global Distributed Rate Limiter

Advanced • 12 min read

5

System Design: Designing a Distributed Logging System (TB/Day Scale)

Advanced • 18 min read

6

System Design: Building an API Gateway Platform

Advanced • 13 min read

7

System Design: Designing Google Drive (Distributed File Storage)

Advanced • 13 min read

8

System Design: Designing a Real-time Recommendation Engine (TikTok / Netflix)

Advanced • 15 min read

9

System Design: Designing a Real-Time Analytics Dashboard

Advanced • 15 min read

10

System Design: Building a Fraud Detection Platform

Advanced • 17 min read

11

Multi-Tenancy in NoSQL: Data Isolation Strategies for SaaS

Advanced • 12 min read

12

System Design: Building a Feature Flag Platform

Advanced • 13 min read