Design a Image Processing Service
Last updated: April 10, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a real-time image processing system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Plaid
April 10, 202610
3
3,396 solved
Design a real-time image processing system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
This is a common system design question asked during Technical Screen at Plaid. The interviewer expects you to demonstrate your ability to design large-scale distributed systems, make well-reasoned trade-offs, and communicate your thought process clearly. Plaid values engineers who can think about scalability from day one.
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
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 implement rate limiting to protect the system?
- 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:
- The system must process images in real-time, allowing for operations such as resizing, cropping, and format conversion.
- It should support various image formats inclu...
Capacity Estimation
To estimate capacity for the image processing service:
- Requests Per Second (RPS):
- Total requests per day: 10 million
- Peak load: Assume 10% of daily requests occur in peak hour, leading ...
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