Design a Notification for Goldman Sachs
Last updated: November 18, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a multi-tenant notification system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Goldman Sachs
November 18, 20256
5
4,108 solved
Design a multi-tenant notification system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Goldman Sachs asks this during the Onsite to assess your architectural thinking. They want to see how you decompose a complex problem, choose appropriate technologies, and reason about failure modes. Strong candidates proactively discuss monitoring, alerting, and operational concerns.
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
- How would you handle schema migrations with zero downtime?
- How would you handle a region-wide outage?
- How would you migrate from a monolithic to a microservices architecture?
- How would you optimize costs as the system scales?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- Multi-Tenant Support: The system must handle notifications for multiple clients (tenants) such as retail banking, investment banking, and asset management.
- **Noti...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming Goldman Sachs has around 10,000 active clients, with each client sending an average of 100 notifications per day:
- Total Notifications: 10,000 clients * 100 notifications = 1,000,000 not...
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