Architect a geo-distributed Feed Generation Engine
Last updated: May 10, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a geo-distributed feed generation system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Optiver
System Design
Software Engineer
Optiver
May 10, 2026Software Engineer
Technical Screen
System Design
Medium
8
5
816 solved
Design a geo-distributed feed generation system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Optiver asks this during the Technical Screen to assess your architectural thinking. They want to see how you decompose a complex problem, choose appropriate technologies, and reason about failure modes. Strong candidates proactively discuss monitoring, alerting, and operational concerns.
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
Consistency models and replication
Message queues and async processing
API design and rate limiting
Database selection and data modeling
High-level architecture and component design
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 region-wide outage?
- How would you migrate from a monolithic to a microservices architecture?
- What monitoring and alerting would you set up on day one?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- Real-time Data Feed Generation: The system must generate and provide financial data feeds to clients in real-time, with low latency.
- Geo-distribution: The sys...
Capacity Estimation
Back-of-Envelope Calculations
- User Base: Assume 10,000 active clients, each generating requests.
- Requests per Client: Each client may generate an average of 100 requests per second d...
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