Build a Resilient Chain of Clue-Driven HTTP Requests
Last updated: July 18, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a system that can handle a series of HTTP requests where each request's outcome influences the next request, ensuring resilience against failures.
Ramp
July 18, 20269
0
175 solved
Design a system that can handle a series of HTTP requests where each request's outcome influences the next request, ensuring resilience against failures.
This question is typically asked during onsite interviews for software engineering roles at Ramp to assess a candidate's ability to design robust systems. The interviewer evaluates the candidate's understanding of HTTP protocols, error handling, and resilience strategies in distributed systems. Candidates are expected to demonstrate their problem-solving skills and ability to think critically about system design under potential failure scenarios.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Explain the flow of requests and how each request is dependent on the previous one.
- Discuss error handling strategies for failed requests.
- Outline how to implement retries and fallback mechanisms.
- Consider scalability and performance implications.
- Mention logging and monitoring for observability.
Key Topics to Cover
How to Approach This
- Apply SOLID principles. Single Responsibility makes code testable, Open/Closed makes it extensible.
- Choose data structures based on access patterns, not familiarity.
- Prefer immutable data and message passing over shared mutable state for concurrency.
- Design APIs with RESTful conventions, versioning, meaningful errors, and pagination from day one.
Possible Follow-up Questions
- How would you handle rate limiting in this system?
- What strategies would you use to improve the performance of the requests?
- Can you discuss how you would implement logging and monitoring for this system?
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Practice System Design ProblemsSample Answer
Requirements
To build a resilient chain of clue-driven HTTP requests, we need to define the requirements clearly. The system should allow for a sequence of HTTP requests where each request's result determines the ...
High-Level Design
At a high level, the architecture could consist of a request orchestrator that manages the sequence of HTTP requests. Each request can be processed asynchronously, allowing for non-blocking operations...
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