Design a Inventory Management for Salesforce
Last updated: February 2, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a real-time inventory management system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Salesforce
February 2, 20264
6
1,533 solved
Design a real-time inventory management system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
System design interviews at Salesforce typically last 45-60 minutes. You are expected to drive the conversation, starting from requirements gathering through to a detailed architecture. The interviewer will evaluate your ability to handle ambiguity and make practical engineering decisions.
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 do you ensure data consistency across multiple services?
- What would the deployment pipeline look like for this system?
- What monitoring and alerting would you set up on day one?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements:
- Real-time Inventory Updates: The system must allow for real-time updates on inventory levels as products are added, sold, or returned.
- User Authentication: O...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming the inventory management system will have:
- 10 million inventory transactions per day (adding, removing, and updating items).
- Peak usage during sales or promotions may see up to **2,00...
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