Build a distributed Authentication Pipeline
Last updated: November 6, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a distributed authentication system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Tesla
System Design
Software Engineer
Tesla
November 6, 2025Software Engineer
Onsite
System Design
Easy
70
8
1,879 solved
Design a distributed authentication system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Tesla 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
- Clearly define functional and non-functional requirements
- Propose a reasonable high-level architecture with core components
- Choose appropriate data storage solutions with basic justification
- Discuss basic scaling strategies (horizontal scaling, caching)
- Identify potential bottlenecks and suggest simple solutions
Key Topics to Cover
Database selection and data modeling
API design and rate limiting
Caching strategies (local, distributed, CDN)
Failure handling and fault tolerance
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 implement rate limiting to protect the system?
- What happens if one of your database nodes goes down?
- How would you handle a region-wide outage?
Practice a Similar Problem on Codemia
Solve a related problem with our interactive workspace, get AI feedback, and view detailed solutions.
Solve on CodemiaSample Answer
Requirements
Functional Requirements
- User Registration: Allow users to create accounts with email/phone verification.
- Login: Authenticate users via username/password or OAuth providers (Google, A...
Capacity Estimation
Daily Requests Calculation
- User Base: 5 million active users.
- Average Logins per User: 2 logins per day.
- Total Daily Requests: 5 million users * 2 logins = 10 million authenticat...
Submit Your Answer
Markdown supported