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System Design Interview Prep Crash Course

Q: How many days does it take to prepare for a System Design interview?

Preparing for a System Design interview can take anywhere from 3 to 10 weeks, depending on your skill level, the role you’re applying to, and other external factors. Ideally, you should commit to 3 hours a day for 5 days a week.

Have a System Design Interview coming up? Breeze through the basics and get interview-ready in hours through a selection of hand-picked practice problems.

Intermediate

33 Lessons

Certificate of Completion

Have a System Design Interview coming up? Breeze through the basics and get interview-ready in hours through a selection of hand-picked practice problems.

AI-POWERED

Code Feedback

Mock Interview

Explanations

Prompt

AI-POWERED

Code Feedback

Mock Interview

This course includes

20 AI Feedbacks

41 Quizzes

16 Code Snippets

Course Overview

What You'll Learn

Course Content

Recommendations

Course Overview

System design interviews play a vital role in hiring software engineers and managers. These interviews test the ability of the candidate to solve problems under different constraints. A candidate’s performance in a system design interview is a significant factor in deciding the hire/no-hire decisions and the level assigned to the incoming candidate. In this course, you’ll go through a miniature form of our primary course on system design: Grokking Modern System Design Interview for Engineers & Managers. Th...Show More

System design interviews play a vital role in hiring software engineers and managers. These interviews test the ability of the c...Show More

What You'll Learn

An understanding of system design to get you ready for the interview in less time

Familiarity with a collection of 30 frequently asked design problems and solutions

The ability to pick and choose a problem of your liking and complete it in 15 minutes

An understanding of how various popular web-scale services are constructed

The ability to learn how larger systems use smaller systems as building blocks

An understanding of system design to get you ready for the interview in less time

Course Content

Introduction

2 Lessons

This chapter introduces you to System Design and its Interview, course structure, prerequisites, and how it prepares you for system design interviews.

Introduction to the System Design Interview Prep Crash Course

Course Structure for System Design Interview Prep Crash Course

Elementary Design Problems

17 Lessons

This chapter teaches you fundamental system designs like load balancers, distributed caches, messaging queues, etc. essential for designing real-world systems.

Domain Name System (DNS)

Load Balancers

Databases in Distributed Systems

Design a Key-Value Store

Design a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Design a Unique ID Generator

Design a Client-Side Monitoring Service

Design a Server-Side Monitoring Service

Design a Distributed Cache

Design a Distributed Messaging Queue

Design a Pub-Sub

Design a Rate Limiter

Design a Blob Store

Design a Distributed Search

Design a Distributed Logging Service

Design a Distributed Task Scheduler

Design Sharded Counters

Advanced Design Problems

13 Lessons

This chapter focuses on complex designs like YouTube, Uber, Google Maps, Instagram, etc., honing your skills for the tough system design interviews.

Design YouTube

Design Quora

Design Google Maps

Design a Proximity Service/Yelp

Design a URL Shortening Service/TinyURL

Design a Web Crawler

Design WhatsApp

Design Typeahead Suggestion

Design a Collaborative Document Editing Service/Google Docs

Concluding Remarks

1 Lessons

This chapter wraps up the course, summarizing key insights and preparing you for success in your upcoming system design interviews.

Conclusion

Trusted by 2.5 million developers working at companies

"This is a great course to go through when an interview is close."

Titoh

Learner

"Excellent content, short and to the point."

Gokul Mahajan

Learner

"This is a truly excellent course"

M.Taha Masood

Learner

"The platform's hands-on coding environment and well-structured content enabled me to build confidence and achieve my career goals efficiently."

Sanjay C

Learner

Hands-on Learning Powered by AI

See how Educative uses AI to make your learning more immersive than ever before.

Instant Code Feedback

Evaluate and debug your code with the click of a button. Get real-time feedback on test cases, including time and space complexity of your solutions.

AI-Powered Mock Interviews

Put your skills to the test in a simulated interview setting. Receive personalized feedback based on your performance. Available in Premium & Premium Plus plans.

Adaptive Learning

At various checkpoints throughout Educative courses, you will be prompted to take a quick assessment. Receive a condensed curriculum tailored to your strengths and skill gaps.

Explain with AI

Select any text within any Educative course, and get an instant explanation — without ever leaving your browser.

AI Code Mentor

AI Code Mentor helps you quickly identify errors in your code, learn from your mistakes, and nudge you in the right direction — just like a 1:1 tutor!

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Free Resources

blog

Components of System Design

blog

System Design Interview Questions

cheatsheet

What is Availability in System Design?

blog

System Design fundamentals

blog

Amazon System design Interview Questions

cheatsheet

System Design Building Blocks

cheatsheet

What is Performance in System Design?

blog

Distributed Systems

blog

Scalable Systems

blog

FAANG/MAANG System Design Interview

blog

Facebook System Design Interview Questions

cheatsheet

Solve Any System Design Interview Question

blog

Microsoft System Design Interview

blog

Uber Backend System Design

blog

Google System Design Interview Questions

Frequently Asked Questions

How many days does it take to prepare for a System Design interview?

Preparing for a System Design interview can take anywhere from 3 to 10 weeks, depending on your skill level, the role you’re applying to, and other external factors. Ideally, you should commit to 3 hours a day for 5 days a week.