For experienced engineers

System Design Masterclass

Go from mid-level developer to system design interview ace in 10 weeks.

Duration: 10 weeks
Duration
Sessions: 15
Sessions
Labs: 10
Labs
Projects: 2
Projects

What You'll Be Able To Do

After completing this course, you will confidently:

Estimate capacity requirements and define SLAs for large-scale systems serving millions of users
Design horizontal scaling strategies using load balancers, sharding, and partitioning
Choose appropriate data stores by analyzing read/write patterns, consistency requirements, and query needs
Architect caching layers with cache-aside, write-through, and invalidation strategies
Design asynchronous processing pipelines with message queues and event-driven architectures
Decompose monolithic systems into microservices with proper API design and service boundaries
Implement reliability patterns including circuit breakers, retries, rate limiting, and graceful degradation
Communicate system design decisions clearly in interview settings with structured trade-off analysis

What You'll Build

Real portfolio projects that showcase your skills to employers.

Distributed URL Shortener

Design a URL shortening service handling 100M daily redirects. Covers consistent hashing, distributed caching, analytics pipelines, and rate limiting. Includes a written design document with architecture diagrams.

System DesignRedisPostgreSQLKafkaNginx

Interview value:

URL shortener is the most common warm-up system design question. A polished design document shows interviewers you can think at scale.

Real-Time Chat Platform

Design a chat platform supporting 1M concurrent WebSocket connections, message persistence, read receipts, typing indicators, and group messaging. Covers connection management, message ordering, and eventual consistency.

System DesignWebSocketsRedis Pub/SubCassandraKafka

Interview value:

Real-time systems test your understanding of concurrency, consistency trade-offs, and protocol design — advanced topics that distinguish senior candidates.

Course Curriculum

10 weeks of structured, hands-on learning.

1System Design Framework & Capacity Estimation

The system design interview framework — requirements, estimation, design, deep dive
Back-of-the-envelope estimation — users, QPS, storage, bandwidth
SLAs, SLOs, and SLIs — defining reliability targets
Case study: designing a URL shortener step-by-step

Lab: Design Exercise — URL ShortenerLive Demo

2Load Balancing & Horizontal Scaling

Load balancer architectures — L4 vs L7, health checks, algorithms
Horizontal vs vertical scaling — when and why
Stateless service design and session management
Auto-scaling strategies — reactive, predictive, and scheduled

Lab: Design Exercise — Scalable Web ServiceLive Demo

3Caching Strategies

Cache-aside, write-through, write-behind, and read-through patterns
Cache invalidation — TTL, event-driven, and versioned keys
CDN caching, application caching, and database query caching
Cache stampede prevention and hot-key mitigation

Lab: Design Exercise — Global Content DeliveryLive Demo

4Database Design & Data Modeling

SQL vs NoSQL — when to use each and common anti-patterns
Database sharding — horizontal partitioning, shard keys, and rebalancing
Replication — leader-follower, leader-leader, and quorum reads
Consistency models — strong, eventual, causal, and read-your-writes

Lab: Design Exercise — E-Commerce Product CatalogLive Demo

5Message Queues & Event-Driven Architecture

Message queue patterns — point-to-point, pub/sub, and fan-out
Apache Kafka architecture — topics, partitions, consumer groups
Event sourcing and CQRS — when they help and when they add complexity
Dead-letter queues, retry strategies, and exactly-once processing

Lab: Design Exercise — Notification PlatformLive Demo

6Microservices Architecture

Monolith to microservices — decomposition strategies and bounded contexts
API design — REST, gRPC, and GraphQL trade-offs
Service discovery, API gateways, and inter-service communication
Distributed transactions — saga pattern, two-phase commit, and compensation

Lab: Design Exercise — Food Delivery BackendLive Demo

7Reliability & Fault Tolerance

Circuit breaker pattern — implementation and threshold tuning
Retry strategies — exponential backoff, jitter, and retry budgets
Rate limiting — token bucket, sliding window, and distributed rate limits
Graceful degradation — feature flags, fallbacks, and bulkheads

Lab: Design Exercise — Payment GatewayLive Demo

8Real-Time Systems & WebSockets

WebSocket connection management at scale
Real-time data pipelines — change data capture and streaming
Presence and typing indicators — fan-out strategies
Message ordering, deduplication, and delivery guarantees

Lab: Design Exercise — Chat PlatformLive Demo

9Search, Recommendations & Analytics

Full-text search with Elasticsearch — indexing, analyzers, and ranking
Recommendation system architecture — collaborative and content-based
Analytics pipelines — batch processing, stream processing, and data warehouses
OLTP vs OLAP and the Lambda architecture

Lab: Design Exercise — Social Media News FeedLive Demo

10Mock Interviews & Capstone Review

Full mock system design interviews with real-time feedback
Common mistakes and how to recover during interviews
Communication framework — structuring your response for clarity
Design document review and portfolio presentation

Lab: Mock System Design InterviewLive Demo

Hands-On Labs Included

You build these yourself — guided exercises with real tools, not passive demos.