SASoftware Academy

System Design Interview Framework

A seven-step path from an ambiguous prompt to a clear, trade-off-aware architecture discussion.

Advanced⏱ 1 min readLesson 12 of 30#system-design#interviews#requirements#capacity#trade-offs

Interview flow: clarify requirements, estimate scale, draw the core path, then deep dive into risks and recoveryInterview flow: clarify requirements, estimate scale, draw the core path, then deep dive into risks and recovery

  1. Clarify users, core flows, scope, latency, availability and consistency.
  2. Estimate peak RPS, storage, bandwidth and growth.
  3. Draw the smallest core path.
  4. Model data and name each source of truth.
  5. Define APIs with authorization and idempotency.
  6. Deep dive into the hard invariant/bottleneck.
  7. Close with failure modes, observability, cost and evolution.

State assumptions aloud. Keep the first design simple, name what is intentionally deferred, and explain which metric says a trade-off has stopped being acceptable.