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System Design with AI Interview Guide

Official Companion Repository

The book is the masterclass. This repository is the practice lab.

The book teaches the full reasoning, chapter walkthroughs, trade-off narratives, and interview storytelling. This repository helps you practice that thinking through templates, prompts, rubrics, diagrams, and companion artifacts.

System Design Checklist

Use this checklist before finishing a practice answer or mock interview. It is intentionally compact. The book explains these areas in detail.

Problem Framing

  • Did I clarify the goal?
  • Did I identify users and actors?
  • Did I define what is out of scope?
  • Did I state assumptions clearly?

Requirements

  • Did I separate functional requirements from non-functional requirements?
  • Did I identify the core user promise?
  • Did I define scale, latency, availability, and consistency needs?

Architecture

  • Does every component have a clear responsibility?
  • Did I avoid overloading one service?
  • Did I explain synchronous vs asynchronous flows?
  • Did I identify critical paths?

Data

  • Did I choose storage based on access patterns?
  • Did I define ownership of important data?
  • Did I explain consistency trade-offs?
  • Did I address retention, privacy, or audit needs?

Scale and Performance

  • Did I identify bottlenecks?
  • Did I use caching intentionally?
  • Did I consider partitioning or sharding?
  • Did I handle hot keys, hot content, or traffic spikes?

Reliability

  • Did I include timeouts, retries, and circuit breakers where appropriate?
  • Did I discuss fallback and graceful degradation?
  • Did I explain regional or dependency failures?
  • Did I avoid retry storms and cascading failure?

Security and Abuse

  • Did I discuss authentication and authorization?
  • Did I identify trust boundaries?
  • Did I address abuse, fraud, or rate limiting?
  • Did I protect sensitive data?

Observability

  • Did I define metrics?
  • Did I include logs and traces?
  • Can the system explain important decisions after the fact?
  • Did I include alerting on user-impacting symptoms?

Cost

  • Did I identify major cost drivers?
  • Did I mention cost controls?
  • Did I avoid expensive work on the critical path where possible?

AI, If Applicable

  • Is AI actually needed?
  • What evidence grounds the AI output?
  • What happens when confidence is low?
  • Can the AI decision be replayed?
  • Who owns correction or escalation?

Final Question

Can I defend why this design is good enough for the stated requirements and what I would change next as the system evolves?