Design Authentication Infrastructure for IoT devices

Last updated: February 2, 2026

Quick Overview

Design a event-driven authentication system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.

Grafana Labs
Software Engineering Fundamentals
Software Engineer
Grafana Labs
February 2, 2026
Software Engineer
Technical Screen
Software Engineering Fundamentals
Medium

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Design a event-driven authentication system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.

Software engineering fundamentals questions at Grafana Labs test your understanding of core CS concepts and their practical application. This Technical Screen question evaluates how you apply engineering principles to build maintainable, scalable software.

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
SOLID principles
Design patterns (Factory, Observer, Strategy, etc.)
Version control and branching strategies
CI/CD pipelines
Concurrency and thread safety
Testing strategies (unit, integration, e2e)
How to Approach This
  1. Apply SOLID principles. Single Responsibility makes code testable, Open/Closed makes it extensible.
  2. Choose data structures based on access patterns, not familiarity.
  3. Prefer immutable data and message passing over shared mutable state for concurrency.
  4. Design APIs with RESTful conventions, versioning, meaningful errors, and pagination from day one.
Possible Follow-up Questions
  • How would you document this for other engineers?
  • How would you measure the performance of this component in production?
  • What are the security implications of this design?
  • How would this design change if the team size doubled?
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Sample Answer
Core Principles

Start by identifying which engineering principles are most relevant: **SOLID Principles**: Single Responsibility (one reason to change), Open/Closed ...

Design Approach

**API Design**: Define clear interfaces before implementation. Use RESTful conventions for HTTP APIs. Version your APIs from the start. Return meaning...


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