Build a scalable Feed Generation Pipeline
Last updated: October 26, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a scalable feed generation system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Morgan Stanley
System Design
Software Engineer
Morgan Stanley
October 26, 2025Software Engineer
Technical Screen
System Design
Easy
10
5
1,656 solved
Design a scalable feed generation system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
System design interviews at Morgan Stanley 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
- Clearly define functional and non-functional requirements
- Propose a reasonable high-level architecture with core components
- Choose appropriate data storage solutions with basic justification
- Discuss basic scaling strategies (horizontal scaling, caching)
- Identify potential bottlenecks and suggest simple solutions
Key Topics to Cover
Monitoring, logging, and alerting
Caching strategies (local, distributed, CDN)
Security and authentication
Database selection and data modeling
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 a region-wide outage?
- How would you handle schema migrations with zero downtime?
- What happens if one of your database nodes goes down?
- What would the deployment pipeline look like for this system?
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Requirements
- Functional Requirements:
- The system must generate and deliver real-time financial feeds for stocks, bonds, and derivatives.
- Must support filtering and sorting of feeds based on use...
Capacity Estimation
- Assuming Morgan Stanley has around 10 million retail and institutional clients who request feeds.
- If each client requests updates every second, that results in approximately 10 million requests ...
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