Architect a high-throughput Feed Generation Engine
Last updated: October 2, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a high-throughput feed generation system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
JPMorgan
October 2, 202533
9
3,515 solved
Design a high-throughput feed generation system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
JPMorgan asks this during the Onsite 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
- 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
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
- What happens if one of your database nodes goes down?
- How would you handle a region-wide outage?
- What would the deployment pipeline look like for this system?
- How would you handle a 10x increase in traffic overnight?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- High-Throughput Request Handling: The system must handle millions of requests per second from various financial services.
- Real-Time Data Processing: Generate fe...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming the system needs to handle 10 million requests per second (RPS) during peak hours:
- Data Size: Each feed might be around 1 KB in size. Hence, total data transfer would be 10 million * 1 ...
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