Show Notes
Episode 1 of your 3-part System Design Interview deep-dive podcast series! This episode focuses on how interviewers at FAANG and Tier-1 financial institutions evaluate you—which is how you think, not just what you know. The hosts will cover: The RADIO Framework: The 5-step, 45-minute blueprint for every interview: Requirements, API Design, Data Model, Infrastructure, and Optimise & Operate. The #1 Trap for Candidates: Why skipping Non-Functional Requirement (NFR) clarification—like asking about SLAs, active users, and data volume before jumping in—is the main reason senior candidates fail. Scalability & The CAP Theorem: A deep dive into Horizontal vs. Vertical scaling, when to use Sharding, and the core trade-offs of the CAP Theorem (Consistency vs. Availability) when network partitions are inevitable. Episode 2 The Database Decision Matrix: How to clearly articulate when to use an RDBMS (PostgreSQL) for ACID compliance versus a Document Store (MongoDB) or a Wide-Column Store (Cassandra) for massive write scale. Caching Architectures: Explaining the trade-offs between Cache-Aside, Write-Through, and Write-Behind patterns, as well as how to avoid system crashes like Cache Stampedes and Avalanches. Kafka Deep Dive: Unpacking how to confidently discuss Kafka offsets, consumer groups, and the critical difference between "At-least-once" delivery and "Exactly-once" financial settlement semantics. Episode 3 The Estimation Toolkit: The latency numbers you absolutely must memorize (like L1 cache taking ~1 ns, and a cross-region WAN round-trip taking ~150 ms) and the formulae for calculating daily storage and peak QPS. Designing a Fintech Payment System: A walkthrough of designing for extreme correctness (99.999% availability), including the Saga Pattern for distributed transactions, Idempotency Keys to prevent double-charging, and the Outbox Pattern. The Minute-by-Minute Playbook: How to perfectly pace your 45-minute interview and the exact trade-off language senior engineers use to close strong.
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