Design a large-scale Notification Platform
Last updated: May 2, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a multi-tenant notification system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Goldman Sachs
May 2, 20265
5
84 solved
Design a multi-tenant notification system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
This fundamentals question from Goldman Sachs's System Design Round tests whether you can reason about software design at a deep level. The interviewer expects discussion of maintainability, testability, and operational considerations.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Explain the concept clearly with a practical example
- Discuss when and why to apply this principle
- Identify common mistakes and anti-patterns
- Compare with alternative approaches
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 you document this for other engineers?
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Core Design Principles
For designing a multi-tenant notification system, the following core design principles apply:
- Separation of Concerns: This principle ensures that different aspects of the system (e.g., notific...
Architecture
For Goldman Sachs, the architecture of the notification platform can be based on a microservices approach:
- Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA): We will have separate services for different not...
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