Design Caching Infrastructure for real-time analytics
Last updated: June 3, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a event-driven caching system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Figma
System Design
Software Engineer
Figma
June 3, 2026Software Engineer
Onsite
System Design
Medium
125
9
3,526 solved
Design a event-driven caching system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
System design interviews at Figma typically last 45-60 minutes. You are expected to drive the conversation, starting from requirements gathering through to a detailed architecture. The interviewer will evaluate your ability to handle ambiguity and make practical engineering decisions.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Systematically gather requirements and estimate capacity (QPS, storage, bandwidth)
- Design a scalable architecture with clear component responsibilities
- Make well-reasoned database and caching decisions with trade-off analysis
- Address consistency vs availability trade-offs specific to the use case
- Discuss partitioning strategy, replication, and data modeling
- Cover failure handling, monitoring, and alerting strategies
Key Topics to Cover
Message queues and async processing
Load balancing and horizontal scaling
API design and rate limiting
High-level architecture and component design
Partitioning and sharding strategies
Database selection and data modeling
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 handle schema migrations with zero downtime?
- How would you migrate from a monolithic to a microservices architecture?
- How would you implement rate limiting to protect the system?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- Event Handling: The system should process real-time events related to user interactions in Figma (e.g., edits, comments) and cache analytics data.
- **Data Retrieva...
Capacity Estimation
Back-of-Envelope Calculations
- User Base: Assume Figma has 10 million active users.
- Events per User: Each user generates approximately 100 events per day.
- Total Events: 10 mill...
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