Design Recommendation Infrastructure for IoT devices
Last updated: August 11, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a distributed recommendation system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
ServiceNow
August 11, 202519
5
435 solved
Design a distributed recommendation system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
ServiceNow asks this during the Technical Screen to assess your depth in software engineering. They want to see understanding of design patterns, system architecture, and the trade-offs involved in different technical approaches.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Apply engineering principles to a realistic design scenario
- Discuss trade-offs between different approaches with concrete examples
- Demonstrate understanding of testability, maintainability, and extensibility
- Connect theoretical concepts to production engineering practices
- Discuss how the approach scales with team and codebase size
Key Topics to Cover
How to Approach This
- Apply SOLID principles. Single Responsibility makes code testable, Open/Closed makes it extensible.
- Choose data structures based on access patterns, not familiarity.
- Prefer immutable data and message passing over shared mutable state for concurrency.
- Design APIs with RESTful conventions, versioning, meaningful errors, and pagination from day one.
Possible Follow-up Questions
- What testing strategy would you use for this component?
- How would this design change if the team size doubled?
- How would you measure the performance of this component in production?
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Core Design Principles
For the distributed recommendation system for IoT devices at ServiceNow, the following core design principles apply:
- Separation of Concerns: By breaking down the system into distinct component...
Architecture
I propose a microservices architecture for the recommendation system, consisting of the following core components:
- API Gateway: Acts as the single entry point for all requests, routing them to...
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