Acing The System Design Interview

Zhiyong Tan

ISBN 10: 1633439100 / ISBN 13: 9781633439108

Published by Manning, 2024

About this Item

2024. 1st Edition. paperback. . . . . .

Seller Inventory # V9781633439108

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Acing The System Design Interview
• Publisher: Manning
• Publication Date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1633439100
• ISBN 13: 9781633439108
• Binding: Soft cover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

Ace the toughest system design interview questions and land the job and salary you want!

For software engineers, software architects, and engineering managers looking to advance their careers.

Acing the System Design Interview tackles the hardest part of the software engineering hiring process – the system design interview. Never fear! In this book, Zhiyong Tan reveals his unique system design interview techniques that have earned him job offers from Amazon, Apple, PayPal, and Uber.

The book goes well beyond typical soft skills. You will master a structured and organised approach to present system design ideas like:

• Scaling databases to support heavy traffic
• Distributed transactions techniques to ensure data consistency
• Services for functional partitioning such as API gateway, service mesh, and metadata
• Common API paradigms including REST, RPC, and GraphQL
• Caching strategies, including their tradeoffs
• Logging, monitoring, and alerting concepts that are critical in any system design
• Communication skills that demonstrate your engineering maturity

The interview's open-ended nature often makes nailing it more art than science – and notoriously difficult to prepare for. With this book, you will dive deep into the common technical topics that arise during interviews, learning how to apply them to mentally perfect different kinds of systems.

 

About the technology

Any senior role in software engineering will include system design interviews in the hiring process. Built around open-ended questions with no standard answer, these interviews test how well you understand the design of complex systems. You will need to demonstrate that you can balance trade-offs to design a system that both meets current requirements and is flexible to future modifications and extensions – all in a 50-minute interview!

About the Author

Zhiyong Tan is a manager at PayPal. Previously, he worked as a senior full-stack engineer at Uber, as a data engineer at small startups, and as a software engineer at Teradata. Over the years, he has been on both sides of the table in numerous system design interviews. Zhiyong has also received prized job offers from prominent companies such as Amazon, Apple and Bytedance/TikTok.