Build a real-time Notification Pipeline
Last updated: November 9, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a real-time notification system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
JPMorgan
November 9, 20250
17
3,061 solved
Design a real-time notification 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 JPMorgan. 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. JPMorgan 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 optimize costs as the system scales?
- What would the deployment pipeline look like for this system?
- How do you ensure data consistency across multiple services?
- How would you handle schema migrations with zero downtime?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- Real-time Notifications: The system should send notifications to users in real-time based on events triggered in the banking system (e.g., transaction alerts, securi...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming JPMorgan has roughly 50 million active users and expects to send notifications for 10% of transactions:
- Transaction Volume: 10 million transactions per day, leading to approximately 1,0...
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