Top 5 System Design Patterns for Senior Developer Interviews

System design interviews test your ability to design large-scale systems. Here are 5 patterns you must know.

Distribute traffic across servers:

Algorithms

Round Robin

Least Connections

IP Hash

Weighted Round Robin

Key Considerations

Health checks

Session persistence

SSL termination

Geographic distribution

Reduce database load and improve latency:

Strategies

Cache-Aside

Write-Through

Write-Behind

Read-Through

Technologies

Redis for distributed caching

Memcached for simple key-value

CDN for static content

Scale writes horizontally:

Approaches

Range-based sharding

Hash-based sharding

Directory-based sharding

Challenges

Cross-shard queries

Rebalancing data

Maintaining consistency

Decouple services and handle spikes:

Use Cases

Async processing

Event-driven architecture

Load leveling

Retry mechanisms

Technologies

Apache Kafka for streaming

RabbitMQ for traditional queuing

AWS SQS for managed queues

Prevent cascade failures:

States

Closed (normal)

Open (failing)

Half-Open (testing)

Implementation

Use Resilience4j

Configure thresholds

Implement fallbacks

1Start with requirements

2Estimate scale

3Design high-level first

4Deep dive into components

5Discuss trade-offs

Our System Design course includes mock interviews with real FAANG questions.