Design Email Infrastructure for real-time analytics
Last updated: October 7, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a scalable email system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Zoom
System Design
Machine Learning Engineer
Zoom
October 7, 2025Machine Learning Engineer
Technical Screen
System Design
Medium
10
7
2,765 solved
Design a scalable email system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
System design interviews at Zoom 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
High-level architecture and component design
Requirements gathering and capacity estimation
Database selection and data modeling
Load balancing and horizontal scaling
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 region-wide outage?
- How would you handle a 10x increase in traffic overnight?
- How would you implement rate limiting to protect the system?
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Requirements
- Functional Requirements:
- Handle incoming emails for real-time analytics, processing millions of requests per day.
- Provide event-driven notifications to trigger analytics workflows (e.g...
Capacity Estimation
- Estimated Traffic:
- Assume Zoom processes 10 million emails per day, with an average of 5 seconds per email for processing.
- This translates to about 115 email requests per second (QPS).
...
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