Build a scalable Feed Generation Pipeline
Last updated: February 21, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a scalable feed generation system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Compass
System Design
Software Engineer
Compass
February 21, 2026Software Engineer
System Design Round
System Design
Medium
66
14
831 solved
Design a scalable feed generation system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Compass asks this during the System Design Round to assess your architectural thinking. They want to see how you decompose a complex problem, choose appropriate technologies, and reason about failure modes. Strong candidates proactively discuss monitoring, alerting, and operational concerns.
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
Message queues and async processing
Database selection and data modeling
Monitoring, logging, and alerting
Requirements gathering and capacity estimation
High-level architecture and component design
Security and authentication
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?
- What happens if one of your database nodes goes down?
- How would you handle a 10x increase in traffic overnight?
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Requirements
- Functional Requirements:
- Generate personalized content feeds for users based on their preferences and interactions.
- Support real-time updates to feeds as user interactions occur.
- All...
Capacity Estimation
- User Base: Assume 10 million active users.
- Request Rate: If each user accesses the feed 10 times per day, that results in:
- (10,000,000 ext{ users} imes 10 ext{ requests/user/day} =...
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