Design a Ad Serving for Plaid
Last updated: May 24, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a fault-tolerant ad serving system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Plaid
May 24, 202649
4
936 solved
Design a fault-tolerant ad serving system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
This fundamentals question from Plaid's Onsite tests whether you can reason about software design at a deep level. The interviewer expects discussion of maintainability, testability, and operational considerations.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Apply engineering principles to a realistic design scenario
- Discuss trade-offs between different approaches with concrete examples
- Demonstrate understanding of testability, maintainability, and extensibility
- Connect theoretical concepts to production engineering practices
- Discuss how the approach scales with team and codebase size
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 document this for other engineers?
- What testing strategy would you use for this component?
- How would this design change if the team size doubled?
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Core Design Principles
To design a fault-tolerant ad serving system for Plaid, we should adhere to the CAP theorem which states that a distributed system can only guarantee two of the following three properties at any g...
Architecture
The architecture for the ad serving system will be microservices-based. Key components include: 1. Ad Selection Service: Handles the logic of selecting which ads to serve based on user data and ta...
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