Design a distributed Search System
Last updated: March 16, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a distributed search system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
JPMorgan
March 16, 202610
5
2,587 solved
Design a distributed search system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
This fundamentals question from JPMorgan'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
- What are the security implications of this design?
- How would you handle backward compatibility?
- How would this design change if the team size doubled?
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Core Design Principles
For the distributed search system at JPMorgan, the following core design principles apply:
- SOLID Principles: Specifically, the Single Responsibility Principle (SRP) and Dependency Inversion Pr...
Architecture
The architectural approach for this distributed search system involves:
- Microservices Architecture: We will use microservices to decouple functionalities. For instance, separate services for d...
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