Design Ad Serving Infrastructure for mobile apps
Last updated: May 9, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a low-latency ad serving system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Jump Trading
May 9, 202632
11
4,875 solved
Design a low-latency ad serving system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Jump Trading 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
- Design a complex system component applying multiple engineering principles
- Reason about system-level trade-offs: performance, reliability, developer experience
- Discuss advanced patterns: event sourcing, CQRS, distributed transactions
- Address cross-cutting concerns: observability, security, backward compatibility
- Demonstrate depth in both theoretical foundations and practical implementation
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 this design change if the team size doubled?
- How would you document this for other engineers?
- How would you handle backward compatibility?
- What testing strategy would you use for this component?
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Core Design Principles
In designing a low-latency ad serving infrastructure for mobile apps at Jump Trading, several core design principles are paramount:
- Separation of Concerns: This principle ensures that differen...
Architecture
For the ad serving system at Jump Trading, a microservices architecture is appropriate. This architecture would include the following components:
- Ad Selection Service: Responsible for querying...
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