Architect a geo-distributed Ad Serving Engine
Last updated: November 18, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a geo-distributed ad serving system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
NVIDIA
System Design
Software Engineer
NVIDIA
November 18, 2025Software Engineer
Onsite
System Design
Hard
2
10
3,205 solved
Design a geo-distributed ad serving system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
System design interviews at NVIDIA typically last 45-60 minutes. You are expected to drive the conversation, starting from requirements gathering through to a detailed architecture. The interviewer will evaluate your ability to handle ambiguity and make practical engineering decisions.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Drive the design discussion proactively with minimal interviewer guidance
- Perform detailed capacity estimation and use it to inform design decisions
- Design for global scale with multi-region deployment and data consistency
- Deep dive into 2-3 critical components with implementation-level detail
- Address complex trade-offs: CAP theorem, eventual consistency, conflict resolution
- Discuss operational excellence: deployment strategy, chaos engineering, SLOs/SLIs
- Propose a phased rollout plan from MVP to full-scale system
Key Topics to Cover
Load balancing and horizontal scaling
Requirements gathering and capacity estimation
Consistency models and replication
Caching strategies (local, distributed, CDN)
High-level architecture and component design
Partitioning and sharding strategies
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 a 10x increase in traffic overnight?
- How would you handle schema migrations with zero downtime?
- What monitoring and alerting would you set up on day one?
- How would you optimize costs as the system scales?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- Ad Request Handling: The system must process millions of ad requests per second from various geographical locations.
- Geo-Targeting: Ads should be served based...
Capacity Estimation
Estimation Breakdown
- User Base: Assume 100 million unique users worldwide.
- Daily Requests: Each user generates an average of 10 ad requests per day.
- Total Daily Requests: 100 ...
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