Design a multi-tenant Email System
Last updated: April 18, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a multi-tenant email system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Snapchat
April 18, 202637
8
4,777 solved
Design a multi-tenant email system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
System design interviews at Snapchat 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
- What happens if one of your database nodes goes down?
- What would the deployment pipeline look like for this system?
- How would you optimize costs as the system scales?
- How would you handle a region-wide outage?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements:
- Multi-Tenancy: Support multiple users and organizations under a single email system, allowing them to manage their own email domains.
- Email Sending/Receiving...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming Snapchat has around 500 million users, with an estimated 30% of them actively using the email feature:
- Active Users: 150 million
- Emails Sent/Received Daily: If each user sends and...
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