System design interviews Staff level
This is not a rant. I want to know what i might not know. I am curious to understand what is expected in a System design interview for staff level. I interviewed for a high paying popular company. I was asked a logging system and in my view i touched everything right from client to load balancer to components at the server side for aggregation/sampling/ databases/ caching primary-secondary storage etc etc. The interviewer was awesome and clearly knew his craft. However I was still not selected and it was due to my SD performance. Considering these interviews are only 1 hour long what more can i present in limited time to suggest i am at "staff" level position bar? I often read people saying grokking or exponent type Youtube videos are not enough for Staff level. I have designed a lottttttt of systems at amazon and i love reviewing designs. I have sat in many PE reviews. Looking to understand what makes a design a "staff" level design vs a "senior/junior" level design? Especially considering the 1 hour time limit. #SystemDesign
This!
No one can say without being there. Maybe you jumped to quickly into solving, didn't keep it conversational made too many assumptions, or maybe they just didn't get your out of the box thinking. It's quite difficult to say.
it makes sense. Still what would a staff level do differently
Even at staff level...Id think you'd still want to ask some solid questions before jumping into solving. But again, I wasn't there. Maybe you crushed it and the solution was above their head so they didn't see how it could work.
What kind of follow ups from the interviewer? How did you answer those? Did you solve the crux of problem - peak load ingestion, data store tradeoffs for query patterns?
those definitely are interesting problems. I can easily talk about both in detail. The catch is after the initial chit chat intro, and covering the basics, you wont even reach a point where you start discussion on such deeper topics. The risk with jumping deeper into them would have been getting ratholed in a specific area. My interview centered a lot around client side and what metric i am logging and schema of the metric.
Spot on. That is delicate balancing as an interviewee. Either going for a solution in breadth or just pick a couple of components and dive deep. Hard to pick cues from the interviewer & honestly it's more about reading the mind n luck. Btw, was this a logging system or a metrics monitoring system.?
Did you ask enough clarifying questions in the beginning and through the interview? Especially about requirements and scoping of work?
i can assume i did. I would not know if i did not since they declined to share "specific" feedback
Could be just bad luck. Nobody expects a perfect design that's future proof right off the bat. You may want to consider asking questions about mvp requirements and starting with a skeleton design, and gradually building on top while engaging in conversation/discussion with the interviewer. Generally, you'll have to collaborate with at least a handful of people in real life to design anything that is agreeable.
System design is a crap shoot. Either you get lucky or you don't.
I was rejected by a company due to relying too much on AWS services during the systems design according to them. I told them that the job description had cloud experience as requirement and it also mentioned that AWS experience was a plus so that's what I used to implement my architecture. And during the interview I pointed out that instead of SQS/SNS we could use Kafka, Mongo instead of Dynamo, etc. I guess the committee only checked the diagram. They were nice enough to send me a comprehensive feedback after the onsite loop and relying too much on AWS was the only negative point.
what company
That's lame. It could just be one person on the committee who wanted to feel powerful. Not everybody gives enough credit to others, especially during interviews. When someone has a strong negative opinion, I've never seen the rest of the committee fight back. They just go over the flow. It's not right, but it is what it is.
I expect a lot more team dynamics and ability to design something that demonstrates ownership and responsibility over an extended period of time once you're interviewing above senior. With so many of you searching for more money, I'm looking for the person who will stick around for a while at this level so how can that come across in your SD questions?
part of going through the system design is to get a sense that the candidate had a practical experience with any of that or just talking through the plain vanilla prep. "throw the load balancers here and there, spruce with caches all over the place, talk about SQL v no SQL DB". done.
Usually depends on your reasoning, logical thinking, making trade offs and deal with failures. Also can not say anything that is obvious wrong or unrelated, which really requires good understanding of a system.
are you guys hiring or is it a freeze? do you pay 400+ for staff/principal