Design a Feed Generation for Notion
Last updated: May 24, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a distributed feed generation system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Notion
System Design
Software Engineer
Notion
May 24, 2026Software Engineer
Technical Screen
System Design
Easy
49
7
508 solved
Design a distributed feed generation system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Notion asks this during the Technical Screen to assess your architectural thinking. They want to see how you decompose a complex problem, choose appropriate technologies, and reason about failure modes. Strong candidates proactively discuss monitoring, alerting, and operational concerns.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Clearly define functional and non-functional requirements
- Propose a reasonable high-level architecture with core components
- Choose appropriate data storage solutions with basic justification
- Discuss basic scaling strategies (horizontal scaling, caching)
- Identify potential bottlenecks and suggest simple solutions
Key Topics to Cover
Caching strategies (local, distributed, CDN)
Failure handling and fault tolerance
Message queues and async processing
Monitoring, logging, and alerting
Consistency models and replication
High-level architecture and component design
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
- What happens if one of your database nodes goes down?
- How do you ensure data consistency across multiple services?
- How would you migrate from a monolithic to a microservices architecture?
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Requirements
- Functional Requirements:
- Generate a personalized feed for each user based on their activity, preferences, and shared content.
- Update feeds in real-time as new content is created or...
Capacity Estimation
- User Base: Assume Notion has 10 million users.
- Requests per User: Each user generates an average of 5 feed requests per minute.
- Total Requests:
10,000,000 users * 5 requests/...
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