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🧠 System Design Mastery Plan: 4-Week Principal Track

Week 1: Foundations + Communication Framework

Goal: Refresh core design concepts and set a strong communication baseline for interviews.

🎯 Key Topics:

  • Latency, throughput, availability, consistency
  • CAP theorem, PACELC
  • Load balancers, caching, CDN, sharding, replication
  • Communication framework: [Define → Decompose → Design → Discuss Tradeoffs → Deliver]

🔨 Tasks:

Principal Focus:

  • Articulate how you'd align the architecture with business goals (e.g., latency SLAs vs. cost)

Week 2: Core Distributed Systems + Consistency Trade-offs

Goal: Deep dive into reliability and consistency architectures.

🎯 Key Topics:

  • Leader election, quorum-based consensus
  • Eventual vs. strong consistency
  • Kafka vs. RabbitMQ vs. SQS
  • Async vs sync flows (and orchestration vs choreography)
  • Sagas and idempotency

🔨 Tasks:

  • Read: Designing Data-Intensive Applications (DDIA) Ch.4-6 + Jepsen blog on failure modes
  • Design Exercise: Real-time Collaborative Document Editor (e.g., Google Docs)
    • Focus: CRDTs vs. Operational Transform
  • Coding Optional: Implement a simplified distributed log with Java/Python
  • Trade-off Deep Dive: When to favor availability over consistency?

Principal Focus:

  • Call out when to use Sagas vs. distributed locks and why, based on business resilience needs.

Week 3: Scalability, Observability & Developer Velocity

Goal: Build large-scale design muscle + think like a platform owner.

🎯 Key Topics:

  • Partitioning, replication, eventual consistency
  • Observability: metrics, logs, traces
  • CI/CD architecture
  • Feature flagging, rollback strategies

🔨 Tasks:

  • Design Exercise: YouTube-like Video Platform

    • Focus: Upload flow, metadata service, caching, transcoding, delivery (CDN)
    • Think: hot content caching, region-based scaling

  • Discuss: How would you evolve it to support live streaming?

  • Build: A scalable logging architecture with Kafka + Elasticsearch

  • Talk-through: How would you improve build velocity by 10x?

Principal Focus:

  • Highlight org-level enablement: designing observability not just for monitoring but to empower engineers.

Week 4: Real Interview Mocks + GenAI/AIOps Tie-ins

Goal: Synthesize all into interview-ready articulation.

🎯 Key Topics:

  • End-to-end architectural decisions
  • ML inference at scale (tie into your GenAI tools)
  • API Gateway vs. Service Mesh
  • Multi-region architecture and disaster recovery

🔨 Tasks:

  • Design Exercise: **AI-assisted Developer Platform **

    • Focus: Prompt routing, feedback loop, telemetry
    • Think: LLM latency, cost, security in design

  • Mock Interview (with me): Pick one of:

    • Global Notification System (e.g., WhatsApp/Meta Push Infra)
    • Payment Gateway (e.g., Stripe)
    • GitHub-like platform (versioning, forking, webhooks)

  • Behavioral Tie-In: Practice “Architect vs. Coder” stories — how you drove business impact

Principal Focus:

  • Explain not just “what you built” but “why this architecture mattered to the business”

🗂 Artifacts You’ll Produce:

  • 4 system design diagrams
  • 1 communication framework doc (your go-to intro framing)
  • 1 “Principal Architect Signature Story” (e.g., GenAI platform or UBM)
  • 3 design mock answers with business-impact tradeoffs
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