Build a scalable File Storage Pipeline
Last updated: September 12, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a scalable file storage system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
DE Shaw
September 12, 20251
6
2,884 solved
Design a scalable file storage system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
DE Shaw asks this during the System Design Round 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
- Map the business problem to a concrete ML objective
- Propose reasonable features and a baseline model
- Discuss basic model evaluation metrics
- Outline a simple serving architecture
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
- What is your model retraining strategy?
- How would you handle a 10x increase in prediction requests?
- How would you run A/B tests on different model versions?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- File Uploads: Users can upload files of various formats (e.g., images, documents).
- File Retrieval: Users can retrieve stored files efficiently.
- **File ...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming DE Shaw expects to handle 10 million requests per day, we can break this down:
- Requests per second: 10 million requests/day ÷ 86400 seconds/day ≈ 115.74 requests/second.
- **File Size...
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