Design a Video Streaming for Waymo
Last updated: July 3, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a geo-distributed video streaming system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Waymo
July 3, 20257
6
696 solved
Design a geo-distributed 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 Waymo. 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. Waymo 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 handle a 10x increase in traffic overnight?
- How would you implement rate limiting to protect the system?
- What monitoring and alerting would you set up on day one?
- How would you handle schema migrations with zero downtime?
Practice a Similar Problem on Codemia
Solve a related problem with our interactive workspace, get AI feedback, and view detailed solutions.
Solve on CodemiaSample Answer
Requirements
Functional Requirements
- Video Ingestion: Ability to ingest and encode high-definition video streams from Waymo vehicles in real-time.
- Streaming: Support for adaptive bitrate streaming ...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming Waymo's fleet consists of 10,000 vehicles, each generating 10 video streams per hour (one per minute), we can estimate the following:
- Total Video Streams: 10,000 vehicles * 10 streams/h...
Submit Your Answer
