AI System Design Interview Prep — Architecture, Scale & Trade-offs

What System Design Interviews Test

System design interviews assess your ability to design scalable, reliable, and maintainable systems. Unlike coding interviews, there is no single correct answer — interviewers evaluate your thought process, your ability to identify trade-offs, and how you handle ambiguity.

Typical questions: • "Design Twitter/Facebook Feed" • "Design a URL shortener like Bit.ly" • "Design a distributed cache" • "Design a ride-sharing system like Uber" • "Design a real-time collaborative document editor" • "Design a video streaming platform like YouTube"

adjiQ knows the canonical approach for each of these and can guide you live.

Framework: How to Approach Any System Design Question

adjiQ teaches and applies the RDSP framework:

1. Requirements Clarification — functional and non-functional requirements, scale estimates 2. Data Modeling — entities, relationships, storage format (SQL vs NoSQL) 3. System Components — API design, service decomposition, data flow 4. Performance & Scale — caching (Redis), CDN, load balancers, horizontal scaling

For each component, adjiQ explains when to use it and why — not just what it is.

Key System Design Concepts Covered

• CAP Theorem — consistency vs. availability trade-offs • Database sharding, replication, and partitioning strategies • Message queues: Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS — when to use each • Caching layers: write-through vs. write-back, TTL strategies, cache invalidation • API design: REST vs GraphQL vs gRPC for different use cases • Rate limiting: token bucket, leaky bucket algorithms • Content Delivery Networks: edge caching, origin servers • Distributed consensus: Raft, Paxos, leader election • Microservices vs. monolith trade-offs • Observability: logging, metrics, tracing

Real-Time Guidance During the Interview

When your interviewer says "Design a notification system for 100 million users," adjiQ immediately:

1. Suggests the clarifying questions you should ask 2. Proposes a high-level architecture to sketch 3. Identifies the key bottlenecks to address 4. Suggests specific technologies with justifications 5. Prepares you for follow-up questions

You drive the conversation — adjiQ is your silent technical advisor.