System Design Interview Roadmap

The Complete Roadmap to System Design Mastery

A structured guide to mastering large-scale, distributed systems architecture — 120+ essential topics across 14 categories, delivered as weekly deep-dive posts.

topic categories

core topics covered

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From the archive

Oct 2, 2026

LangChain & LlamaIndex Internal Architecture: How Orchestration Frameworks Work

A team at a 30-person fintech startup wires up a LangChain agent to answer support tickets:…

Sep 29, 2026

Design an API Gateway — Walkthrough

Archetype: Infrastructure & Platform · Asked at: AWS, Kong, Google Apigee

Sep 27, 2026

India Engineers Targeting FAANG: What's Different and What Isn't

The system design interview is the same interview in Bangalore as it is in San Francisco.

Sep 25, 2026

Quantization & Pruning — Optimizing Models for Edge Deployment

Section 9: AI & LLM Infrastructure

Sep 22, 2026

Design a Metrics Monitoring System (Datadog) — Walkthrough

Archetype: Infrastructure & Platform · Asked at: Datadog, Google (Monarch), Meta (ODS)

Sep 20, 2026

Message Queues: Kafka vs SQS vs Task Queue

Three technologies for moving work between services.

Sep 18, 2026

A/B Testing for ML Models — Canary Releases and Shadow Mode in Inference

Introduction

Sep 15, 2026

Design a Web Crawler — Walkthrough

Archetype: Search & Ranking · Asked at: Google, Bing, Common Crawl

The curriculum

5 core areas covered

01 Foundational architectures: client-server, microservices, event-driven patterns

02 Data layer: replication, sharding, partitioning, distributed consensus

03 Performance & reliability: caching strategies, load balancing, failover

04 Real-world case studies of how major companies scale

05 Critical trade-offs: consistency, availability, latency, and cost

What you'll walk away with

A repeatable 5-step framework for any interview question, not a memorized script

The ability to explain trade-offs — consistency vs. availability, latency vs. cost — instead of reciting buzzwords

Real-world case studies you can reference under questioning, not textbook examples

What you're signing up for

What makes it different

"System design interviews are not about memorization, not about answer keys — they're about structured thinking you can defend under questioning."

Format

Weekly deep-dive posts via email, each covering one topic with clear, actionable insights and real-world architecture examples.

Who it's for

Engineers who can whiteboard the theory but freeze the moment an interviewer asks "why not the other way?" — this newsletter is the structured-thinking practice for that moment.

A few things worth knowing

How often will I get an email?

Weekly — check "From the archive" above to see the actual pace before you subscribe.

Is this actually free?

Yes — 100% free, no card required, no trial that converts to a charge later.

Can I unsubscribe anytime?

Yes, one click, no hoops — that's a standard Substack feature, not something we gate.

Structured thinking beats memorized answers. Start with issue #1.

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