Design Email Infrastructure for mobile apps
Last updated: September 24, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a distributed email system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Jane Street
September 24, 20256
4
4,993 solved
Design a distributed email system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Jane Street asks this during the Onsite to assess your architectural thinking. They want to see how you decompose a complex problem, choose appropriate technologies, and reason about failure modes. Strong candidates proactively discuss monitoring, alerting, and operational concerns.
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
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 a 10x increase in traffic overnight?
- How would you handle a region-wide outage?
- How would you migrate from a monolithic to a microservices architecture?
- What would the deployment pipeline look like for this system?
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Requirements
- Functional Requirements:
- Ability to send and receive emails via mobile apps.
- Support for real-time notifications for new emails.
- User authentication and authorization for accessing e...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming Jane Street has about 10 million users and each user sends/receives an average of 20 emails per day:
- Total Emails per Day: 10 million users * 20 emails = 200 million emails/day.
- **QPS...
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