Design a Email for Waymo
Last updated: July 18, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a distributed email system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Waymo
System Design
Product Manager
Waymo
July 18, 2025Product Manager
Onsite
System Design
Medium
40
5
1,083 solved
Design a distributed email system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
System design interviews at Waymo typically last 45-60 minutes. You are expected to drive the conversation, starting from requirements gathering through to a detailed architecture. The interviewer will evaluate your ability to handle ambiguity and make practical engineering decisions.
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
Message queues and async processing
API design and rate limiting
Monitoring, logging, and alerting
Consistency models and replication
Security and authentication
Database selection and data modeling
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?
- What monitoring and alerting would you set up on day one?
- How would you handle a 10x increase in traffic overnight?
- How would you handle schema migrations with zero downtime?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements:
- User Registration and Authentication: Users must be able to create accounts and log in securely.
- Email Sending and Receiving: Users can send and receive emai...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming Waymo has 1 million users:
- Email Volume: Each user sends and receives an average of 20 emails per day.
- Total Emails per Day: 1 million users * 20 emails = 20 million emails/day. -...
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