Design Email Infrastructure for mobile apps
Last updated: August 8, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a multi-tenant email system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Tesla
System Design
Software Engineer
Tesla
August 8, 2025Software Engineer
Onsite
System Design
Medium
248
14
2,726 solved
Design a multi-tenant email system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
This is a common system design question asked during Onsite at Tesla. The interviewer expects you to demonstrate your ability to design large-scale distributed systems, make well-reasoned trade-offs, and communicate your thought process clearly. Tesla values engineers who can think about scalability from day one.
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
Partitioning and sharding strategies
Security and authentication
Database selection and data modeling
Consistency models and replication
Monitoring, logging, and alerting
Requirements gathering and capacity estimation
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 migrate from a monolithic to a microservices architecture?
- What would the deployment pipeline look like for this system?
- How would you implement rate limiting to protect the system?
- How would you handle schema migrations with zero downtime?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- Multi-Tenant Support: The system must support multiple Tesla mobile applications, each with its own email namespace.
- Email Sending and Receiving: Users should...
Capacity Estimation
Back-of-Envelope Calculations
- Daily Email Requests: Assume 5 million requests per day, translating to approximately 58 emails per second (QPS).
- Storage Needs: If each email averages 75...
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