Build a fault-tolerant Content Delivery Pipeline
Last updated: March 1, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a fault-tolerant content delivery system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Optiver
March 1, 202611
8
1,696 solved
Design a fault-tolerant content delivery system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
This is a common system design question asked during Technical Screen at Optiver. The interviewer expects you to demonstrate your ability to design large-scale distributed systems, make well-reasoned trade-offs, and communicate your thought process clearly. Optiver values engineers who can think about scalability from day one.
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
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 implement rate limiting to protect the system?
- How would you optimize costs as the system scales?
- What happens if one of your database nodes goes down?
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Requirements
- Functional Requirements:
- Support for delivering a variety of content types (text, images, videos) to users.
- Ability to handle millions of concurrent requests with low latency.
- User a...
Capacity Estimation
- Request Per Second (QPS): Assuming Optiver has around 1 million users, with 30% active users at peak times, we estimate:
- 300,000 concurrent users.
- If each user makes 2 requests per secon...
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