Design a Inventory Management for Optiver
Last updated: September 10, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a low-latency inventory management system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Optiver
September 10, 20257
5
1,598 solved
Design a low-latency inventory management system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Optiver asks this during the System Design Round to assess your depth in software engineering. They want to see understanding of design patterns, system architecture, and the trade-offs involved in different technical approaches.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Design a complex system component applying multiple engineering principles
- Reason about system-level trade-offs: performance, reliability, developer experience
- Discuss advanced patterns: event sourcing, CQRS, distributed transactions
- Address cross-cutting concerns: observability, security, backward compatibility
- Demonstrate depth in both theoretical foundations and practical implementation
Key Topics to Cover
How to Approach This
- Apply SOLID principles. Single Responsibility makes code testable, Open/Closed makes it extensible.
- Choose data structures based on access patterns, not familiarity.
- Prefer immutable data and message passing over shared mutable state for concurrency.
- Design APIs with RESTful conventions, versioning, meaningful errors, and pagination from day one.
Possible Follow-up Questions
- What testing strategy would you use for this component?
- How would you document this for other engineers?
- How would this design change if the team size doubled?
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Core Design Principles
For an inventory management system at Optiver, the following core design principles are vital:
- Separation of Concerns: This principle ensures that different functionalities of the inventory sy...
Architecture
The architectural approach for Optiver's inventory management system will be microservices-based. Key components include:
- Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA): Each service (inventory service, ...
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