Design a Video Streaming Service
Last updated: September 11, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a real-time video streaming system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
MongoDB
September 11, 202545
7
2,762 solved
Design a real-time video streaming system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
MongoDB asks this during the Onsite 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
- What are the security implications of this design?
- What testing strategy would you use for this component?
- How would you measure the performance of this component in production?
- How would you document this for other engineers?
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Core Design Principles
In designing a real-time video streaming service, we should adhere to the SOLID principles, particularly the Single Responsibility Principle and Dependency Inversion Principle. The Single ...
Architecture
I propose a microservices architecture for the video streaming service, which aligns with MongoDB's cloud-native approach. Key services would include: 1. Video Upload Service for ingesting vid...
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