Build a event-driven URL Shortening Pipeline
Last updated: October 27, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a event-driven url shortening system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Salesforce
October 27, 202537
13
4,521 solved
Design a event-driven url shortening system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
This fundamentals question from Salesforce's Technical Screen tests whether you can reason about software design at a deep level. The interviewer expects discussion of maintainability, testability, and operational considerations.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Apply engineering principles to a realistic design scenario
- Discuss trade-offs between different approaches with concrete examples
- Demonstrate understanding of testability, maintainability, and extensibility
- Connect theoretical concepts to production engineering practices
- Discuss how the approach scales with team and codebase size
Key Topics to Cover
How to Approach This
- Apply SOLID principles. Single Responsibility makes code testable, Open/Closed makes it extensible.
- Choose data structures based on access patterns, not familiarity.
- Prefer immutable data and message passing over shared mutable state for concurrency.
- Design APIs with RESTful conventions, versioning, meaningful errors, and pagination from day one.
Possible Follow-up Questions
- How would you handle backward compatibility?
- How would you measure the performance of this component in production?
- How would this design change if the team size doubled?
- What testing strategy would you use for this component?
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Core Design Principles
For the event-driven URL shortening pipeline, we will apply the Single Responsibility Principle and Separation of Concerns. The URL shortener should focus solely on generating short URLs and h...
Architecture
The architecture will be based on a microservices pattern using an event-driven model. We will implement a Message Queue (e.g., Kafka) to manage requests asynchronously. The **URL Shortening Servi...
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