Design a real-time Content Delivery System
Last updated: July 27, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a real-time content delivery system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Atlassian
July 27, 202524
7
3,928 solved
Design a real-time content delivery system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Software engineering fundamentals questions at Atlassian test your understanding of core CS concepts and their practical application. This Onsite 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 this design change if the team size doubled?
- What testing strategy would you use for this component?
- How would you handle backward compatibility?
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Core Design Principles
For designing a real-time Content Delivery System (CDS) at Atlassian, we will focus on the following core design principles:
- Separation of Concerns: This principle is crucial as it allows us t...
Architecture
The architecture of the real-time Content Delivery System will include the following components:
- Microservices: The system will consist of several microservices, including:
- **Content Mana...
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