Design a large-scale Authentication Platform
Last updated: February 23, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a low-latency authentication system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Oracle
System Design
Software Engineer
Oracle
February 23, 2026Software Engineer
Technical Screen
System Design
Medium
1
7
4,525 solved
Design a low-latency authentication system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Oracle asks this during the Technical Screen to assess your understanding of the full ML lifecycle. They want to see how you translate a business problem into an ML objective, design the feature pipeline, and plan for model monitoring and retraining.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Define clear ML objectives with appropriate loss functions and metrics
- Design a comprehensive feature engineering pipeline
- Discuss model selection with trade-offs (complexity vs interpretability vs latency)
- Plan online and offline evaluation strategies including A/B testing
- Address serving infrastructure: batch vs real-time, latency requirements
- Consider data quality, labeling strategy, and feedback loops
Key Topics to Cover
Training pipeline and infrastructure
A/B testing and experimentation
Model selection and architecture
Feature engineering and feature stores
Model serving and latency optimization
Online vs offline evaluation
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
- What would you do if model performance degrades over time?
- How would you ensure fairness and reduce bias in the model?
- How would you debug a model that works well offline but poorly online?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- User Registration: Users should be able to register using email and password.
- User Authentication: Support for login via email/password and/or multi-factor au...
Capacity Estimation
To estimate capacity:
- User Base: Assume 10 million active users.
- Requests: Each user averages 5 authentication requests per day.
- Peak Load: Consider a peak load of 20 requests per se...
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