Design a large-scale Notification Platform
Last updated: August 6, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a geo-distributed notification system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Coinbase
August 6, 202539
13
3,634 solved
Design a geo-distributed notification 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 Coinbase. 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. Coinbase values engineers who can think about scalability from day one.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Systematically gather requirements and estimate capacity (QPS, storage, bandwidth)
- Design a scalable architecture with clear component responsibilities
- Make well-reasoned database and caching decisions with trade-off analysis
- Address consistency vs availability trade-offs specific to the use case
- Discuss partitioning strategy, replication, and data modeling
- Cover failure handling, monitoring, and alerting strategies
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 handle a 10x increase in traffic overnight?
- How would you migrate from a monolithic to a microservices architecture?
- What monitoring and alerting would you set up on day one?
- How would you implement rate limiting to protect the system?
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Requirements
- Functional Requirements:
- Support multiple notification types (email, SMS, push notifications).
- Ability to schedule notifications for future delivery.
- User preferences for notificatio...
Capacity Estimation
- Estimating QPS:
- Assume 10 million notifications per day.
- Average notification delivery occurs in bursts around peak usage times (e.g., during promotions).
- Estimated average QPS = 10,...
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