Design Search Infrastructure for IoT devices
Last updated: January 13, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a scalable search system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Mastercard
January 13, 20266
8
587 solved
Design a scalable search system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
This is a common system design question asked during Technical Screen at Mastercard. The interviewer expects you to demonstrate your ability to design large-scale distributed systems, make well-reasoned trade-offs, and communicate your thought process clearly. Mastercard values engineers who can think about scalability from day one.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Drive the design discussion proactively with minimal interviewer guidance
- Perform detailed capacity estimation and use it to inform design decisions
- Design for global scale with multi-region deployment and data consistency
- Deep dive into 2-3 critical components with implementation-level detail
- Address complex trade-offs: CAP theorem, eventual consistency, conflict resolution
- Discuss operational excellence: deployment strategy, chaos engineering, SLOs/SLIs
- Propose a phased rollout plan from MVP to full-scale system
Key Topics to Cover
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 happens if one of your database nodes goes down?
- How do you ensure data consistency across multiple services?
- How would you handle a region-wide outage?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements:
- Search Capability: The system should allow IoT devices to perform keyword-based searches across various data types (e.g., transactions, device statuses).
- **Filte...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming the system needs to support 10 million IoT devices, and each device generates an average of 10 search queries per day:
- Total daily searches = 10 million devices * 10 searches/device =...
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