Design a Notification for Plaid
Last updated: September 29, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a real-time notification system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Plaid
September 29, 202546
12
1,324 solved
Design a real-time notification system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
This is a common system design question asked during Onsite at Plaid. The interviewer expects you to demonstrate your ability to design large-scale distributed systems, make well-reasoned trade-offs, and communicate your thought process clearly. Plaid values engineers who can think about scalability from day one.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Drive the design discussion proactively with minimal interviewer guidance
- Perform detailed capacity estimation and use it to inform design decisions
- Design for global scale with multi-region deployment and data consistency
- Deep dive into 2-3 critical components with implementation-level detail
- Address complex trade-offs: CAP theorem, eventual consistency, conflict resolution
- Discuss operational excellence: deployment strategy, chaos engineering, SLOs/SLIs
- Propose a phased rollout plan from MVP to full-scale system
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 a 10x increase in traffic overnight?
- How would you implement rate limiting to protect the system?
- How would you handle a region-wide outage?
- How would you migrate from a monolithic to a microservices architecture?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements:
- Real-Time Notifications: Users should receive notifications in real-time when significant events occur (e.g., account transactions, status changes).
- **User Prefe...
Capacity Estimation
Capacity Estimation:
Assuming that Plaid has around 10 million active users, each user receives an average of 2 notifications per day:
- Total Notifications per Day: 10 million users * 2 notif...
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