Design a Logging for Compass
Last updated: October 6, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a scalable logging system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Compass
October 6, 20253
3
4,278 solved
Design a scalable logging system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
This fundamentals question from Compass's Technical Screen 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
- Apply engineering principles to a realistic design scenario
- Discuss trade-offs between different approaches with concrete examples
- Demonstrate understanding of testability, maintainability, and extensibility
- Connect theoretical concepts to production engineering practices
- Discuss how the approach scales with team and codebase size
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
- How would this design change if the team size doubled?
- What are the security implications of this design?
- How would you measure the performance of this component in production?
- How would you handle backward compatibility?
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Core Design Principles
For the logging system at Compass, we will adhere to the following core design principles:
- Separation of Concerns: Each component of the logging system should handle a distinct part of the log...
Architecture
The proposed architecture for the logging system consists of the following components:
- Log Producers: Services within Compass that generate log messages. These will send logs to a centralized ...
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