Assess architecture judgment with prompts for scalability, data modeling, reliability, observability, and trade-off communication.
System design interviews should reveal how candidates clarify requirements, model constraints, choose trade-offs, and communicate uncertainty. The best answers are not diagrams alone; they include operational thinking.
Evaluate capacity estimation, bottleneck discovery, partitioning, caching, and graceful degradation.
Looks for queues, rate limits, retries, provider failover, user preferences, idempotency, and observability.
Test schema design, access patterns, consistency requirements, and migration strategy.
Considers permissions, audit history, concurrent edits, score versions, comments, and reporting queries.
Assess failure modes, recovery, SLOs, redundancy, and incident readiness.
Mentions durable storage, resumable uploads, job queues, retries, checksums, status tracking, and alerts.
Check cache invalidation, TTLs, consistency, and performance trade-offs.
Understands CDN caching, ISR/static generation, invalidation, stale-while-revalidate, and correctness boundaries.
Evaluate whether candidates design systems that can be operated after launch.
Looks for latency, completion rate, error rate, queue depth, provider failures, transcript quality, and business metrics.
Put a candidate through a structured AI or human-led round and get a reportcard with the transcript and the code attached.