Acing the System Design Interview

Ace the toughest system design interview questions and land the job and salary you want! For software engineers, software architects, and engineering managers looking to advance their careers.

Acing the System Design Interview tackles the hardest part of the software engineering hiring process – the system design interview. Never fear! In this book, Zhiyong Tan reveals his unique system design interview techniques that have earned him job offers from Amazon, Apple, PayPal, and Uber. The book goes well beyond typical soft skills. You will master a structured and organised approach to present system design ideas like:

Scaling databases to support heavy traffic
Distributed transactions techniques to ensure data consistency
Services for functional partitioning such as API gateway, service mesh, and metadata
Common API paradigms including REST, RPC, and GraphQL
Caching strategies, including their tradeoffs
Logging, monitoring, and alerting concepts that are critical in any system design
Communication skills that demonstrate your engineering maturity

The interview’s open-ended nature often makes nailing it more art than science – and notoriously difficult to prepare for. With this book, you will dive deep into the common technical topics that arise during interviews, learning how to apply them to mentally perfect different kinds of systems.   About the technology Any senior role in software engineering will include system design interviews in the hiring process. Built around open-ended questions with no standard answer, these interviews test how well you understand the design of complex systems. You will need to demonstrate that you can balance trade-offs to design a system that both meets current requirements and is flexible to future modifications and extensions – all in a 50-minute interview!

Author Biography

Zhiyong Tan is a manager at PayPal. Previously, he worked as a senior full-stack engineer at Uber, as a data engineer at small startups, and as a software engineer at Teradata. Over the years, he has been on both sides of the table in numerous system design interviews. Zhiyong has also received prized job offers from prominent companies such as Amazon, Apple and Bytedance/TikTok.