Design a distributed Authentication System
Last updated: October 9, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a distributed authentication system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Uber
October 9, 202549
12
2,583 solved
Design a distributed authentication system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Software engineering fundamentals questions at Uber test your understanding of core CS concepts and their practical application. This System Design Round question evaluates how you apply engineering principles to build maintainable, scalable software.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Design a complex system component applying multiple engineering principles
- Reason about system-level trade-offs: performance, reliability, developer experience
- Discuss advanced patterns: event sourcing, CQRS, distributed transactions
- Address cross-cutting concerns: observability, security, backward compatibility
- Demonstrate depth in both theoretical foundations and practical implementation
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 handle backward compatibility?
- How would you measure the performance of this component in production?
- How would this design change if the team size doubled?
- What are the security implications of this design?
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Core Design Principles
For designing a distributed authentication system for Uber, the following core design principles are essential:
- CAP Theorem: We need to balance consistency, availability, and partition toleran...
Architecture
The architecture of the distributed authentication system will be microservices-based, utilizing the following components:
- API Gateway: Acts as the entry point for all authentication requests,...
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