Design a Video Streaming for Palantir
Last updated: August 27, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a high-throughput video streaming system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Palantir
August 27, 202550
7
1,635 solved
Design a high-throughput video streaming system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
This is a common system design question asked during System Design Round at Palantir. 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. Palantir 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 implement rate limiting to protect the system?
- What monitoring and alerting would you set up on day one?
- What would the deployment pipeline look like for this system?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- User Authentication: Secure user login and access to video content.
- Video Upload: Users can upload videos which are then transcoded in multiple resolutions. 3...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming we have:
- 10 million active users
- Each user streams about 1 hour of video daily
- Average video size: 500 MB
Daily Video Streaming Calculation
- Total Video Size: 10 m...
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