System Design Interview Guide for Frontend Engineers

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date

Apr 8, 2024

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frontend-engineer

status

Published

Your Assessment Results

Given your experience and the kind of companies you're interviewing with, the risk of facing a structured system design interview is low.

Big tech’s interviews typically emphasize problem-solving skills, coding abilities, and understanding of fundamental computer science concepts. Hence, system design interviews will be start with a broad system design questions and then venture into more frontend-specific questions.

However, in small and mid sized companies, it’s rather uncommon to face this interview type. Below the senior level, the risk is also drastically reduced.

Still, if you will face a frontend system design interview, you are most likely to face three types of design questions:

Generic high-level design questions are generic systems you will be asked to discuss and showcase your understanding of the technical and architectural challenges beyond frontend related topics. For example, you might be asked to design a parking lot management system or a air traffic control system.

Real-world high-level design questions are inspired by actual systems and challenge you to consider technical and architectural nuances alongside user experience. For example, you might be asked to design a system akin to Dropbox, assessing your ability to navigate data storage, synchronization, and user-centric features like ease of use and accessibility.

Real-world low-level design questions are concerned with the detailed implementation of a system, including algorithms, data structures, and interfaces. This level of design is useful for understanding the specifics of a system and how it will be implemented. Examples of low level design questions include designing complex system components from scratch or specific UI details of a file-sharing system.

The expected technical depth in these interviews tends to be highly complex for individual contributors, your area of expertise doesn’t have an impact, this only affects the areas in which interviews will deep-dive. While backend engineers will probably be asked to explain complex algorithms and implementation details of database scalability, you can expect frontend interview questions around reducing page load times, optimizing rendering, and minimizing network requests.

You may be wary of trusting a conclusion drawn from a process that might seem obscure. Let me provide some clarity on the factors that led to this determination.

Probability of Encountering a System Design Interview

The likelihood of encountering a standardized system design interview is primarily influenced by two factors:

First, the tier of the company you are interviewing with plays a significant role. Small to mid-sized companies, including startups, are least likely to have a standardized hiring process that includes a formal system design interview. At the other end of the spectrum, large tech companies, often summarized by the acronym FAANG, frequently incorporate system design interviews into their hiring process.

The second factor is your level of seniority. While junior positions across various software-related roles are unlikely to require system design interviews, the probability increases significantly from mid-level positions onwards.

Most Common Types of System Design Interview Questions

As you’ve probably already realized, the pool of potential questions is indefinite. However, I’ve developed a methodology to categorize these questions along two axes. Questions may target either high-level or low-level designs. High-level design questions focus on the architectural aspects of large systems, while low-level design questions delve into the detailed technical specifics and component-level considerations of systems.

The second axis assesses whether the systems in question are existing real-world systems or more generic, somewhat hypothetical constructs.

From these two axes, four quadrants emerge, allowing us to categorize all questions and then map the likelihood of these questions appearing in system design interviews by role.

Examples of system design questions in these quadrants include:

High-Level Design of a Generic System: Design a Vending Machine

Low-Level Design of a Generic System: Design a CDN

High-Level Design of a Real-World System: Design Dropbox

Low-Level Design of a Real-World System: Design a File Sync Service (as found in Dropbox)

Expected Level of System Complexity

Within each quadrant where a system design interview question may fall, there's another important dimension to consider, which I want you to be aware of: the complexity of the systems relative to the role and seniority of candidates.

In my methodology, questions are categorized into five levels of complexity, where 1 represents the least complex and 5 the most complex. As your seniority increases, so does the complexity of the systems you'll discuss, although this complexity tends to plateau at certain levels, particularly in leadership roles.

The advantage of also clustering questions by complexity level is that it makes it easier to prioritize the types of questions you are most likely to encounter during your interview. This approach helps in building an effective preparation strategy, where tackling the most complex questions first is not recommended.

I use this knowledge to shield my coachees from frustration, ensuring a smooth learning experience and fostering personal growth.

Your Best Preparation Strategy

Understanding what to expect from the system design interview is useful, but the real value lies in deriving actionable insights from this understanding. To that end, I'll provide you with a study plan tailored to your professional background and target companies. This approach ensures that you focus on the interview questions for backend software engineers that are most likely to be asked, allowing you to strategically prepare for the highest probability scenarios first.

I regularly advise my students to first understand what constitutes an exceptional interview performance and the common challenges in distributed systems. Following that, we build foundational design and architecture knowledge from the ground up. This involves starting with individual components, progressing to features, and eventually mastering the design of complete systems. This structured methodology ensures thorough preparation for your interviews.

With this guide, you can get started right away. Assuming you are working full-time and managing personal responsibilities, this plan is designed to keep you effectively engaged for about four weeks. Here’s what you should focus on:

Study the System Design Interview Framework

To effectively communicate your design, it's best to adhere to a standardized framework consisting of six key steps:

Requirements Engineering

Reasonable Capacity Estimation

API Design

Data Model

High Level Architecture

Design Discussion

Study Computer Science Fundamentals

Refresh the computer science fundamentals that commonly drive discussions. Get a good overview and skip the rabbit holes, you are still applying for a frontend position.

Horizontal scalability

Microservice architecture

ACID properties of transactions

PACELC theorem (extends CAP)

Study System Design Components

Deepen your understanding of the most common system components to effectively integrate them into software architectures. By thoroughly studying these components, you will be able to justify your choices based on their advantages and disadvantages.

Load Balancer

API Gateway

Microservice

Message Queue

Relational Database

Non-relational Database

CDN Service

Caching Service

Study Supporting Features Independently

Study how to independently draw and explain supporting features used across different systems (like a search engine in Netflix). This will enhance your agility in architecting unfamiliar systems on the spot.

A good starting point for your profile would include:

Search engine

Recommendation engine

User management

Analytics

Notification service

Keep a strong focus on frontend aspect like:

Client-Server architecture

Frontend scalability and performance

State management

UI component architecture

Data fetching and APIs

Study Systems Type by Type

Study types of systems rather than individual famous implementations This approach will allow you to adapt more flexibly to unexpected questions.

Generic high-level system architectures you are very likely to encounter:

Gaming platform

Online chess game

Airport baggage system

Restaurant reservation system

Real-world high-level system architectures you are very likely to encounter:

Messengers (e.g., WhatsApp, Signal)

Survey platform (e.g. Survey Monkey)

Streaming platforms (e.g., Netflix, YouTube, Spotify)

Coding platforms (e.g., Topcoder, Codechef, Hackerrank)

Question-and-answer platforms (e.g., Quora)

Real-world low-level system questions worth preparing with are frontend focus are:

Commenting System

Product Review

News feed

Rating System

Like/dislike button

Summary

Mastering front end engineering interviews as a senior involves more than just proficiency in coding, especially at leading tech companies like Google or Meta.

It necessitates a comprehensive and tailored preparation strategy. This guide has provided a structured approach to navigating the complexities of frontend system design interviews, which are often an overlooked yet critical component of the hiring process.

With this preparation strategy, you're equipped with the insights needed to anticipate and effectively address a wide spectrum of frontend-related design questions.

Armed with a four weeks program you can kick-off your r interview prep with confidence!

Fast-Track Your Preparation

If you're short on time and eager to get started, check out my highly-rated Udemy course. Designed based on the most common needs from my tech interview coaching clients, this course condenses the essential knowledge into less than 5 hours of video content. It's a fast track to mastering what you need to know.

System Design Interview Guide for Frontend Engineers | Low Prob