Build a geo-distributed Email Pipeline
Last updated: September 14, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a geo-distributed email system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Optiver
September 14, 2025120
10
720 solved
Design a geo-distributed email system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
This is a common system design question asked during Onsite 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 migrate from a monolithic to a microservices architecture?
- What would the deployment pipeline look like for this system?
- How would you implement rate limiting to protect the system?
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Requirements
- Functional Requirements:
- Handle email requests from various geolocations with minimal latency.
- Provide real-time email delivery tracking and status updates.
- Support multiple email fo...
Capacity Estimation
- Email Volume: Assuming 10 million emails per day:
- QPS Calculation: 10,000,000 emails / 86400 seconds = ~115.74 emails/second.
- During peak times, we estimate a burst of 10,000 emails per ...
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