Design a real-time Analytics System
Last updated: October 27, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a real-time analytics system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Zillow
October 27, 2025118
4
2,169 solved
Design a real-time analytics system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Software engineering fundamentals questions at Zillow test your understanding of core CS concepts and their practical application. This System Design Round question evaluates how you apply engineering principles to build maintainable, scalable software.
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 you document this for other engineers?
- What are the security implications of this design?
- How would you handle backward compatibility?
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Core Design Principles
For designing a real-time analytics system at Zillow, the following core design principles apply:
- Separation of Concerns: The system should clearly separate data ingestion, processing, and que...
Architecture
The architecture of the real-time analytics system at Zillow would consist of the following components:
- Data Ingestion Layer: Use Apache Kafka to handle high-throughput data ingestion. It allo...
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