Architect a event-driven Feed Generation Engine
Last updated: December 16, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a event-driven feed generation system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Roblox
December 16, 20257
3
797 solved
Design a event-driven feed generation system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
This is a common system design question asked during Onsite at Roblox. The interviewer expects you to demonstrate your ability to design large-scale distributed systems, make well-reasoned trade-offs, and communicate your thought process clearly. Roblox values engineers who can think about scalability from day one.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Systematically gather requirements and estimate capacity (QPS, storage, bandwidth)
- Design a scalable architecture with clear component responsibilities
- Make well-reasoned database and caching decisions with trade-off analysis
- Address consistency vs availability trade-offs specific to the use case
- Discuss partitioning strategy, replication, and data modeling
- Cover failure handling, monitoring, and alerting strategies
Key Topics to Cover
How to Approach This
- Start by clarifying functional and non-functional requirements with the interviewer.
- Estimate the scale: QPS, storage, bandwidth. This drives your design decisions.
- Draw a high-level architecture first, then deep dive into 1-2 critical components.
- Discuss trade-offs explicitly (e.g., consistency vs availability, SQL vs NoSQL).
- Address failure scenarios, monitoring, and how the system handles 10x traffic spikes.
Possible Follow-up Questions
- How would you handle schema migrations with zero downtime?
- How do you ensure data consistency across multiple services?
- How would you handle a region-wide outage?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- Event Handling: The system must process events in real-time from various sources, such as player actions, game updates, and social interactions.
- **Feed Generation...
Capacity Estimation
Back-of-Envelope Calculations
- User Base: Assume Roblox has 200 million monthly active users.
- Daily Active Users (DAU): Approximately 50 million, with peak traffic around 10 million c...
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