Design Load Balancing Infrastructure for global users

Last updated: December 29, 2025

Quick Overview

Design a low-latency load balancing system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.

SpaceX
System Design
Software Engineer
SpaceX
December 29, 2025
Software Engineer
Onsite
System Design
Easy

192

6

2,091 solved


Design a low-latency load balancing system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.

ML system design at SpaceX goes beyond model selection. This Onsite question evaluates your ability to design end-to-end ML pipelines, from data collection to model serving, while considering production constraints like latency and reliability.

What the Interviewer Expects
  • Map the business problem to a concrete ML objective
  • Propose reasonable features and a baseline model
  • Discuss basic model evaluation metrics
  • Outline a simple serving architecture
Key Topics to Cover
Model selection and architecture
Model serving and latency optimization
Monitoring and model degradation detection
Training pipeline and infrastructure
How to Approach This
  1. Start by clarifying functional and non-functional requirements with the interviewer.
  2. Estimate the scale: QPS, storage, bandwidth. This drives your design decisions.
  3. Draw a high-level architecture first, then deep dive into 1-2 critical components.
  4. Discuss trade-offs explicitly (e.g., consistency vs availability, SQL vs NoSQL).
  5. Address failure scenarios, monitoring, and how the system handles 10x traffic spikes.
Possible Follow-up Questions
  • What would you do if model performance degrades over time?
  • How would you handle the cold start problem?
  • How would you handle a 10x increase in prediction requests?
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Sample Answer
Requirements Clarification

Before diving into the architecture, clarify the scope with the interviewer. For Load Balancing Infrastructure for global users, key functional requir...

Capacity Estimation

Estimate the scale to drive design decisions. Assume 100M DAU with an average of 10 actions per user per day = 1B requests/day ~ 12K QPS average, ~36K...


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