Design a Video Streaming Service
Last updated: November 10, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a scalable video streaming system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
xAI
November 10, 202534
6
1,948 solved
Design a scalable video streaming system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
xAI asks this during the System Design Round to assess your depth in software engineering. They want to see understanding of design patterns, system architecture, and the trade-offs involved in different technical approaches.
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 you handle backward compatibility?
- What testing strategy would you use for this component?
- How would this design change if the team size doubled?
- How would you measure the performance of this component in production?
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Core Design Principles
For designing a scalable video streaming service at xAI, we will focus on the following core design principles:
- Separation of Concerns: This allows different components of the system (such as ...
Architecture
The architecture for the video streaming service will be based on a microservices approach, which allows us to independently deploy and scale components. Key components include:
- Frontend: A res...
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