Design a large-scale Ad Serving Platform
Last updated: May 7, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a fault-tolerant ad serving system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Coinbase
May 7, 202642
5
1,805 solved
Design a fault-tolerant ad serving system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Software engineering fundamentals questions at Coinbase test your understanding of core CS concepts and their practical application. This Technical Screen 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
- What are the security implications of this design?
- What testing strategy would you use for this component?
- How would you measure the performance of this component in production?
- How would this design change if the team size doubled?
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Core Design Principles
For the ad serving platform at Coinbase, the following core design principles apply:
- Separation of Concerns: This principle ensures that different aspects of the system (ad serving, user track...
Architecture
The architecture for the ad serving platform will follow a microservices approach, leveraging the following components:
- API Gateway: Acts as an entry point that routes requests to appropriate ...
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