Design a File Storage for Robinhood
Last updated: April 15, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a fault-tolerant file storage system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Robinhood
April 15, 202693
6
2,796 solved
Design a fault-tolerant file storage system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Robinhood 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
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 handle a region-wide outage?
- How do you ensure data consistency across multiple services?
- What monitoring and alerting would you set up on day one?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- File Upload/Download: Users should be able to upload and download files securely and efficiently.
- File Metadata Management: System should manage file metadata...
Capacity Estimation
Back-of-Envelope Calculations
Assuming Robinhood has approximately 10 million users:
- File Uploads: If each user uploads an average of 1 file per week, we expect around 10 million uploads per...
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