Build a multi-tenant Content Delivery Pipeline
Last updated: July 7, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a multi-tenant content delivery system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Spotify
System Design
Software Engineer
Spotify
July 7, 2025Software Engineer
Onsite
System Design
Hard
90
14
2,655 solved
Design a multi-tenant content delivery system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
System design interviews at Spotify typically last 45-60 minutes. You are expected to drive the conversation, starting from requirements gathering through to a detailed architecture. The interviewer will evaluate your ability to handle ambiguity and make practical engineering decisions.
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
Consistency models and replication
Monitoring, logging, and alerting
Message queues and async processing
Partitioning and sharding strategies
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 schema migrations with zero downtime?
- How would you implement rate limiting to protect the system?
- What monitoring and alerting would you set up on day one?
- How would you handle a 10x increase in traffic overnight?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- Multi-Tenancy: The system should support multiple tenants (content providers) without data leakage between them.
- Content Delivery: Efficiently deliver audio a...
Capacity Estimation
Back-of-Envelope Calculations
- Daily Active Users (DAU): Assume 10 million users access the platform daily.
- Requests per User: Average 20 requests/user/day for content delivery.
- **Tot...
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