Design a real-time Search System
Last updated: June 10, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a real-time search system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Anduril
System Design
Software Engineer
Anduril
June 10, 2026Software Engineer
Technical Screen
System Design
Medium
35
12
2,232 solved
Design a real-time search system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Anduril asks this during the Technical Screen 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
- Systematically gather requirements and estimate capacity (QPS, storage, bandwidth)
- Design a scalable architecture with clear component responsibilities
- Make well-reasoned database and caching decisions with trade-off analysis
- Address consistency vs availability trade-offs specific to the use case
- Discuss partitioning strategy, replication, and data modeling
- Cover failure handling, monitoring, and alerting strategies
Key Topics to Cover
Failure handling and fault tolerance
Message queues and async processing
Caching strategies (local, distributed, CDN)
Load balancing and horizontal scaling
Partitioning and sharding strategies
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 region-wide outage?
- What would the deployment pipeline look like for this system?
- How would you migrate from a monolithic to a microservices architecture?
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Requirements
- Functional Requirements:
- Real-time Search: The system should enable users to perform searches on large datasets, returning results in under 500ms.
- Scalability: Support millions o...
Capacity Estimation
- User Base: Assume 1 million active users with 5 searches per user per day.
- Total Searches per Day: 1 million users * 5 searches = 5 million searches/day.
- Peak Load: Assuming peak usa...
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