Design a event-driven Messaging System

Last updated: December 3, 2025

Quick Overview

Design a event-driven messaging system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.

Roblox
Software Engineering Fundamentals
Software Engineer
Roblox
December 3, 2025
Software Engineer
System Design Round
Software Engineering Fundamentals
Easy

10

3

1,743 solved


Design a event-driven messaging system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.

This fundamentals question from Roblox's System Design Round 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
  • Explain the concept clearly with a practical example
  • Discuss when and why to apply this principle
  • Identify common mistakes and anti-patterns
  • Compare with alternative approaches
Key Topics to Cover
SOLID principles
Code review best practices
Design patterns (Factory, Observer, Strategy, etc.)
Concurrency and thread safety
Performance optimization
API design and RESTful conventions
How to Approach This
  1. Apply SOLID principles. Single Responsibility makes code testable, Open/Closed makes it extensible.
  2. Choose data structures based on access patterns, not familiarity.
  3. Prefer immutable data and message passing over shared mutable state for concurrency.
  4. 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 document this for other engineers?
  • How would you measure the performance of this component in production?
  • How would this design change if the team size doubled?
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Sample Answer
Core Design Principles

For the event-driven messaging system at Roblox, the core design principles that apply are:

  1. Single Responsibility Principle (SRP): Each component in the messaging system should have one reason...
Architecture

The architecture for the event-driven messaging system at Roblox would include:

  1. Message Broker: A central component (like RabbitMQ or Kafka) that handles message routing and delivery between p...

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