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System Design Interview Preparation

A route to system design rounds: the format at each target company, a reusable framework, estimation drills, storage, caching and messaging trade-offs, classic designs, spoken mocks and debriefs.

Free · Mac (Apple silicon) and Windows · v1.0.0 · Other platforms

Then open the Marketplace in the app, search for System Design Interview Preparation, and click Install. It goes into your own files, and works offline from then on.

What it installs.

1

Pillar

1

Area

50

Projects

200

Starter tasks

🏅 Tech & Engineering Certifications

System Design Interview Preparation

Preparing for system design interviews: requirements, capacity estimates, storage and caching choices, trade-offs, common designs and mock sessions out loud.

  1. System design round format at each target company
  2. Design fundamentals skills audit
  3. Recorded baseline design under a 45-minute clock
  4. Virtual whiteboard and drawing set-up
  5. Personal answer framework with time boxes
  6. Latency and capacity numbers reference sheet
  7. Dated preparation plan back from the first round
  8. Design notebook for every practice problem
  9. Twice-weekly design practice blocks
  10. Weekly peer mock interview exchange
  11. Feedback gap tracker and fixes
  12. Daily five-minute estimation drill
  13. Weekly architecture reading habit
  14. Monthly full-length recorded mock and readiness score
  15. Design concepts flashcard deck
  16. Weekly teardown of a product you use
  17. Requirements and scoping questions drill
  18. Capacity estimation from users to servers
  19. API design and data modelling for interviews
  20. Storage choices by access pattern
  21. Caching layers and invalidation
  22. Partitioning, replication and consistency
  23. Queues, logs and asynchronous processing
  24. Reliability, failure modes and operations
  25. Security and privacy in a design answer
  26. Warm-up designs for a shortener, paste service and rate limiter
  27. Feeds, timelines and notification fan-out
  28. Real-time chat, presence and collaborative editing
  29. Search, typeahead and ranking
  30. Media upload, storage and streaming
  31. Location, proximity and matching designs
  32. Payments, ledgers and exactly-once effects
  33. Infrastructure designs for a key-value store, scheduler and crawler
  34. Trade-off statements practice
  35. Choosing which components to go deep on
  36. Turning your own production systems into design material
  37. Choosing a paid mock platform or coach
  38. Company-specific preparation before a scheduled round
  39. Rehearsal on the interview's own tool and setting
  40. Debrief after each real design round
  41. First design round as a new graduate
  42. Driving the round as a senior candidate
  43. Staff and principal design rounds
  44. Design rounds for frontend and mobile engineers
  45. Architecture round for engineering managers
  46. Design preparation on five hours a week
  47. Remote rounds from the Caribbean and other time zones
  48. Multi-region and data residency designs
  49. Cost estimates inside a design
  50. Running design mocks as the interviewer

Where it starts.

Each project arrives with its purpose, milestones and first tasks written out. Here is how the first three read.

System design round format at each target company

Companies run the design round very differently: some want a product design for a mid-level role, others an infrastructure design with heavy numbers, and some use a shared online whiteboard while others use a doc or plain conversation. Writing down what each target company actually does, from the recruiter and the prep material they send, stops you practising for a round you will not face.

First tasks

  • List the companies where you expect a system design round this year
  • Email each recruiter asking for the round length, tool and level expected
  • Save any official interview preparation guide each company publishes
  • Recheck the format notes for every company still on your list @recurring(quarterly)

Design fundamentals skills audit

Most engineers are strong in the parts of the stack they have run in production and thin everywhere else, and the design round finds the thin parts quickly. Rating yourself honestly on twenty or so topics, from load balancing to consistency models, turns a vague worry into a ranked list of what to study first.

First tasks

  • Write down twenty design topics, from load balancers to consensus
  • Rate each topic from one to four with one sentence of evidence
  • Mark which ratings come from production work and which from reading
  • Rank the five weakest topics by how often interviews ask about them

Recorded baseline design under a 45-minute clock

Before any study, designing one familiar product alone with a timer and a screen recording shows your real starting point: where you freeze, where you ramble and how much of the clock goes on requirements. Engineers are often surprised to find they spent twenty minutes before drawing a single box, and that is the most useful thing to learn in week one.

First tasks

  • Pick one familiar product to design and start a screen recording
  • Talk through the whole design aloud with a 45-minute timer running
  • Note from the playback how many minutes each phase took
  • Write down three moments where you stalled, with timestamps

Make it yours.

Install System Design Interview Preparation, then tell Aurum the date you're aiming for. It checks whether the plan fits the weeks you actually have.

Free · Mac (Apple silicon) and Windows · v1.0.0 · Other platforms

Blueprints are general information to help you organise your own work. They are not medical, financial, legal or other professional advice. See the Terms.