Design a Content Delivery Service
Last updated: February 5, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a event-driven content delivery system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Mastercard
System Design
Software Engineer
Mastercard
February 5, 2026Software Engineer
System Design Round
System Design
Easy
2
10
4,365 solved
Design a event-driven content delivery system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
ML system design at Mastercard goes beyond model selection. This System Design Round question evaluates your ability to design end-to-end ML pipelines, from data collection to model serving, while considering production constraints like latency and reliability.
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
Training pipeline and infrastructure
Feature engineering and feature stores
Data collection and labeling strategy
ML objective formulation and metric selection
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 run A/B tests on different model versions?
- How would you handle a 10x increase in prediction requests?
- How would you ensure fairness and reduce bias in the model?
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Requirements
- Functional Requirements:
- The system must deliver content (like transaction alerts, promotional offers) based on user events in real-time.
- It should support personalized and relevant ...
Capacity Estimation
- Traffic Volume:
- Assuming 10 million requests per day, that translates to approximately 115 requests per second (10,000,000 / 86400 seconds).
- Peak traffic could be estimated at 3x ave...
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