Design Recommendation Infrastructure for mobile apps
Last updated: October 16, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a high-throughput recommendation system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Atlassian
October 16, 2025312
4
4,233 solved
Design a high-throughput recommendation system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Atlassian 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
- Explain the concept clearly with a practical example
- Discuss when and why to apply this principle
- Identify common mistakes and anti-patterns
- Compare with alternative approaches
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
- How would you document this for other engineers?
- How would this design change if the team size doubled?
- How would you handle backward compatibility?
- How would you measure the performance of this component in production?
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Core Design Principles
For designing a high-throughput recommendation system at Atlassian, the key design principles include Separation of Concerns, Scalability, and Fault Tolerance.
- **Separation of Concern...
Architecture
The architecture for this recommendation system could be a microservices-based approach, focusing on the following components:
- Data Ingestion Service: This service collects user interactions a...
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