Design Inventory Management Infrastructure for IoT devices
Last updated: November 7, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a low-latency inventory management system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
HubSpot
System Design
Software Engineer
HubSpot
November 7, 2025Software Engineer
System Design Round
System Design
Medium
7
8
4,909 solved
Design a low-latency inventory management system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
System design interviews at HubSpot 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
Monitoring, logging, and alerting
Consistency models and replication
Requirements gathering and capacity estimation
Load balancing and horizontal scaling
Failure handling and fault tolerance
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
- What would the deployment pipeline look like for this system?
- What monitoring and alerting would you set up on day one?
- How would you handle a region-wide outage?
- How would you optimize costs as the system scales?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- Real-time Inventory Tracking: The system must track inventory levels of IoT devices in real-time, updating quantities as devices are added or removed.
- **User Mana...
Capacity Estimation
Back-of-Envelope Calculation
- Daily Requests: 10 million requests per day.
- Peak Hour Traffic: Assuming a peak hour traffic of 10% of daily requests: 1 million requests/hour.
- **Request...
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