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The systems design interview at Facebook assesses candidates' abilities to design large-scale systems, focusing on problem-solving and understanding of system components. Candidates are expected to visualize solutions, make trade-offs, and provide estimates on resource needs while addressing unique challenges faced by Facebook. Preparation involves analyzing existing systems, identifying key problems, and understanding large-scale system concepts without merely repeating learned material.

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Berkay Antmen
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10 views

Systems_Design_Interviews_1

The systems design interview at Facebook assesses candidates' abilities to design large-scale systems, focusing on problem-solving and understanding of system components. Candidates are expected to visualize solutions, make trade-offs, and provide estimates on resource needs while addressing unique challenges faced by Facebook. Preparation involves analyzing existing systems, identifying key problems, and understanding large-scale system concepts without merely repeating learned material.

Uploaded by

Berkay Antmen
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Systems Design Interviews at Facebook

The systems design interview at Facebook focuses on your ability to design a large-scale system end to
end. A strong performance in this interview indicates that you would be successful in applying your
design process to many systems at Facebook.

What we ask
Some example questions are:

• Design a web search engine


• Architect a world-wide video distribution system
• Build a large scale reservation system for bicycles
• Design a marketplace for products

We may focus on specific types of systems (search, Ads, distributed learning systems) if you claim
expertise in there. We may be more product-focused if that’s what you’ve been working on. We don't
expect you to know crazy algorithms that you likely wouldn’t know off the top of your head (like quad
trees or Paxos).

Expectations:
What we are looking for:

• Can you arrive at an answer in the face of unusual constraints?


• Can you visualize the entire problem and solution space?
• Can you make trade-offs like consistency, availability, partitioning, performance?
• Can you give ballpark numbers on QPS supported, # of machines needed using a modern
computer?
• How much have you thought about Facebook and some of the unique problems we face?

A good design shows that you:

• Clearly understand the problem


• Propose a design for a system that breaks the problem down into components, that can be built
independently, and you can drill into any piece of the design and talk about it in detail
• Identify the bottlenecks as the system scales and understand the limitations in your design
• Understand how to adapt the solution when requirements change
• Draw diagrams that clearly describe the relationship between the different components in the
system
• Calculate (back-of-the-envelope) the physical resources necessary to make this system work

How to study
This is the hardest interview to study for.
To practice, take any well-known app and imagine you work for a competitor. Your job is to figure out 1)
where are the most important problems for their system and 2) what are the constraints for their
system. Answering these questions will help you focus on the most important problems and not worry
about solving problems that are not relevant.

For example, Google’s index building layer has many more components for document understanding. It
would need components for extracting deep links, contact information, referrals (for page rank). On the
other hand, Twitter’s index building should be simpler due to small size tweets and some rich media
information for attached media. Twitter’s search is head heavy. So a bulk of engineering efforts in
designing their search should go to rapidly indexing new tweets and making them searchable.

Work out the above problems on a paper and just think about the ways to break them down. It also
helps to read up on common large scale systems, like watch the public videos about memcached, learn
how search engines work read some of the articles in http://highscalability.com/ ,
https://code.facebook.com/posts/ and similar sites. But during the interview, don’t parrot back what
you read; make sure your solution actually answers the question being asked.

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