Roundiva
Sample plan: system design interview in 7 days
This public sample compresses system design prep into one week. It is a teaching artifact for how Roundiva sequences clarifying questions, architecture and failure modes—not a substitute for a personalized sprint when you have confirmed rounds.
Day-by-day outline
Keep each day to a single design theme plus a short retrospective.
- Day 1: Clarifying questions checklist — users, scale, consistency, latency, failure.
- Day 2: Capacity estimation practice on two familiar products.
- Day 3: High-level components — where state lives, sync vs async boundaries.
- Day 4: Data model and API sketch for one end-to-end flow.
- Day 5: Caching, partitioning and consistency trade-offs.
- Day 6: Failure modes — timeouts, retries, hot keys, regional outages.
- Day 7: Timed mock design (45–60 min) with a written scorecard.
What strong answers sound like
Interviewers listen for structured communication: you ask before inventing requirements, you name trade-offs, and you can defend a simpler design when time is short.