Design a Logging for Waymo
Last updated: August 22, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a geo-distributed logging system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Waymo
System Design
Software Engineer
Waymo
August 22, 2025Software Engineer
Technical Screen
System Design
Medium
9
11
210 solved
Design a geo-distributed logging 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
- 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
High-level architecture and component design
API design and rate limiting
Caching strategies (local, distributed, CDN)
Security and authentication
Consistency models and replication
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 do you ensure data consistency across multiple services?
- What monitoring and alerting would you set up on day one?
- How would you handle a region-wide outage?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- Log Ingestion: The system must handle millions of log requests per second from various Waymo vehicles and systems, ensuring real-time processing.
- **Geo-distribute...
Capacity Estimation
Assumptions
- Average vehicle generates 10 logs per second.
- Waymo has approximately 20,000 active vehicles at peak times.
Calculations
- Total Log Ingestion Rate: 20,000 vehicles * 10 ...
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