Design a large-scale Feed Generation Platform
Last updated: March 4, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a scalable feed generation system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
SpaceX
March 4, 20261
13
741 solved
Design a scalable feed generation system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
This is a common system design question asked during Technical Screen at SpaceX. The interviewer expects you to demonstrate your ability to design large-scale distributed systems, make well-reasoned trade-offs, and communicate your thought process clearly. SpaceX values engineers who can think about scalability from day one.
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 would you migrate from a monolithic to a microservices architecture?
- How would you handle a region-wide outage?
- How would you handle a 10x increase in traffic overnight?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- Feed Generation: Ability to generate personalized feeds for millions of users based on their preferences and interactions.
- Real-time Updates: Users should rec...
Capacity Estimation
To estimate the capacity needs:
- User Base: Assume 10 million active users.
- Requests per User: Each user generates about 10 requests per day, leading to a total of 100 million requests da...
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