Design a Authentication for JPMorgan
Last updated: August 2, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a event-driven authentication system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
JPMorgan
August 2, 20257
10
888 solved
Design a event-driven authentication system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
This is a common system design question asked during Technical Screen at JPMorgan. The interviewer expects you to demonstrate your ability to design large-scale distributed systems, make well-reasoned trade-offs, and communicate your thought process clearly. JPMorgan values engineers who can think about scalability from day one.
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
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 optimize costs as the system scales?
- How would you migrate from a monolithic to a microservices architecture?
- What would the deployment pipeline look like for this system?
- How would you implement rate limiting to protect the system?
Practice a Similar Problem on Codemia
Solve a related problem with our interactive workspace, get AI feedback, and view detailed solutions.
Solve on CodemiaSample Answer
Requirements
Functional Requirements:
- User Authentication: Users must be able to log in using username/password, multi-factor authentication (MFA), and biometric options.
- Session Management: Main...
Capacity Estimation
Capacity Estimation:
To estimate capacity, consider the following:
- Peak Load: Assume peak load is 10,000 QPS.
- Daily Active Users: Assume 1 million daily active users, with 40% logging ...
Submit Your Answer
