Design a large-scale Ad Serving Platform
Last updated: August 8, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a low-latency ad serving system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Adobe
August 8, 202558
4
3,157 solved
Design a low-latency ad serving system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Software engineering fundamentals questions at Adobe test your understanding of core CS concepts and their practical application. This System Design Round question evaluates how you apply engineering principles to build maintainable, scalable software.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Apply engineering principles to a realistic design scenario
- Discuss trade-offs between different approaches with concrete examples
- Demonstrate understanding of testability, maintainability, and extensibility
- Connect theoretical concepts to production engineering practices
- Discuss how the approach scales with team and codebase size
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
- How would you measure the performance of this component in production?
- How would you document this for other engineers?
- What are the security implications of this design?
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Core Design Principles
For the Adobe Ad Serving Platform, we will apply the Single Responsibility Principle and Separation of Concerns. The Single Responsibility Principle ensures that each component of the system h...
Architecture
The architecture of the Ad Serving Platform will follow a microservices approach, breaking down functionalities into services such as Ad Selection Service, Ad Delivery Service, and **Analytics...
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