Design a large-scale Load Balancing Platform
Last updated: November 1, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a event-driven load balancing system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Waymo
November 1, 202589
3
4,019 solved
Design a event-driven load balancing system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
System design interviews at Waymo 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 would you migrate from a monolithic to a microservices architecture?
- How would you handle a 10x increase in traffic overnight?
- What monitoring and alerting would you set up on day one?
Practice a Similar Problem on Codemia
Solve a related problem with our interactive workspace, get AI feedback, and view detailed solutions.
Solve on CodemiaSample Answer
Requirements
Functional Requirements
- Request Handling: The system should handle millions of incoming requests per second, balancing them across multiple services.
- Event-Driven Architecture: The l...
Capacity Estimation
To estimate capacity, we need to consider the expected load on the system:
- Expected Requests: Assume Waymo anticipates 5 million requests per second during peak times.
- Average Payload Size...
Submit Your Answer
