Design Analytics Infrastructure for global users
Last updated: February 3, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a scalable analytics system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Workday
February 3, 20268
13
3,834 solved
Design a scalable analytics system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
ML system design at Workday goes beyond model selection. This System Design Round question evaluates your ability to design end-to-end ML pipelines, from data collection to model serving, while considering production constraints like latency and reliability.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Define clear ML objectives with appropriate loss functions and metrics
- Design a comprehensive feature engineering pipeline
- Discuss model selection with trade-offs (complexity vs interpretability vs latency)
- Plan online and offline evaluation strategies including A/B testing
- Address serving infrastructure: batch vs real-time, latency requirements
- Consider data quality, labeling strategy, and feedback loops
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 debug a model that works well offline but poorly online?
- How would you run A/B tests on different model versions?
- What would you do if model performance degrades over time?
- How would you handle the cold start problem?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- User Analytics Dashboard: Provide real-time analytics for global users, including usage statistics, performance metrics, and user engagement insights.
- **A/B Testi...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming Workday has approximately 10 million users, with each user generating an average of 100 analytics events per day:
- Total Events per Day: 10,000,000 users * 100 events/user = 1,000,000,00...
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