Build a multi-tenant File Storage Pipeline
Last updated: September 14, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a multi-tenant file storage system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Supabase
System Design
Software Engineer
Supabase
September 14, 2025Software Engineer
Onsite
System Design
Medium
36
7
1,988 solved
Design a multi-tenant file storage system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Supabase asks this during the Onsite to assess your understanding of the full ML lifecycle. They want to see how you translate a business problem into an ML objective, design the feature pipeline, and plan for model monitoring and retraining.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Define clear ML objectives with appropriate loss functions and metrics
- Design a comprehensive feature engineering pipeline
- Discuss model selection with trade-offs (complexity vs interpretability vs latency)
- Plan online and offline evaluation strategies including A/B testing
- Address serving infrastructure: batch vs real-time, latency requirements
- Consider data quality, labeling strategy, and feedback loops
Key Topics to Cover
Model selection and architecture
Training pipeline and infrastructure
Model serving and latency optimization
A/B testing and experimentation
Feedback loops and model retraining
Online vs offline evaluation
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
- What would you do if model performance degrades over time?
- How would you handle the cold start problem?
- How would you ensure fairness and reduce bias in the model?
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Requirements
- Functional Requirements:
- Support for multi-tenant architecture to isolate data for different users securely.
- Allow users to upload, download, and manage files (CRUD operations).
- I...
Capacity Estimation
- Estimations:
- Assume an average of 1 million users with each user generating 10 file operations per day.
- Total operations per day = 1 million users * 10 operations = 10 million operations...
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