Design a scalable Inventory Management System
Last updated: October 1, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a scalable inventory management system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Mastercard
System Design
Machine Learning Engineer
Mastercard
October 1, 2025Machine Learning Engineer
System Design Round
System Design
Medium
4
12
282 solved
Design a scalable inventory management system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
System design interviews at Mastercard typically last 45-60 minutes. You are expected to drive the conversation, starting from requirements gathering through to a detailed architecture. The interviewer will evaluate your ability to handle ambiguity and make practical engineering decisions.
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
Monitoring, logging, and alerting
Failure handling and fault tolerance
Message queues and async processing
Partitioning and sharding strategies
Caching strategies (local, distributed, CDN)
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?
- What would the deployment pipeline look like for this system?
- What happens if one of your database nodes goes down?
- How do you ensure data consistency across multiple services?
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Requirements
- Functional Requirements:
- Track inventory levels for millions of products across various locations.
- Support CRUD operations on products and inventory quantities.
- Provide real-time upd...
Capacity Estimation
- Volume of Transactions:
- Assuming a retail client base of 1000 stores and an average of 10,000 inventory transactions per day per store, we estimate:
- Total transactions per day: 1000 st...
- Assuming a retail client base of 1000 stores and an average of 10,000 inventory transactions per day per store, we estimate:
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