Prepare for your Google system design interview

Distributed systems and large-scale architecture rounds calibrated to Google’s engineering-excellence, first-principles reasoning culture.

Socratify AI

The Interview

What Google is looking for

System Design Interview

Large-Scale System Architecture

01Distributed Systems at Planetary Scale

02Consistency, Availability & Partition Trade-offs

03Sharding Strategy & Data Distribution

04Latency Budget & Bottleneck Decomposition

Coding Interview

Algorithm & Complexity Round

01Algorithm Design & Big-O Analysis

02Graph & Tree Traversal at Scale

03Memory & CPU Efficiency

04Correctness & Edge Case Handling

Googleyness Interview

Google Leadership & Culture

01First-Principles Reasoning

02Collaborative Problem Solving

03Ambitious Goals & Execution

04User-First Decision Making

Planetary-scale distributed systems bar//First-principles reasoning from scratch//Gold standard system design interviews

Practice Library

Google exercises

Ready to ace your Google system design interview?

Prepare for your Google system design interview

Distributed systems and large-scale architecture rounds calibrated to Google’s engineering-excellence, first-principles reasoning culture.

Socratify AI

The Interview

What Google is looking for

System Design Interview

Large-Scale System Architecture

01Distributed Systems at Planetary Scale

02Consistency, Availability & Partition Trade-offs

03Sharding Strategy & Data Distribution

04Latency Budget & Bottleneck Decomposition

Coding Interview

Algorithm & Complexity Round

01Algorithm Design & Big-O Analysis

02Graph & Tree Traversal at Scale

03Memory & CPU Efficiency

04Correctness & Edge Case Handling

Googleyness Interview

Google Leadership & Culture

01First-Principles Reasoning

02Collaborative Problem Solving

03Ambitious Goals & Execution

04User-First Decision Making

Planetary-scale distributed systems bar//First-principles reasoning from scratch//Gold standard system design interviews

How It Works

Master Google System Design Interviews

Large-scale architecture rounds scored on Google’s consistency trade-offs, sharding strategy, and distributed systems depth dimensions. · Click to expand

1Your System Design Goals

Distributed Systems Design

Practitioner

Scalability & Tradeoff Analysis

Practitioner

2System Design Case Prep

Design Google Search’s distributed index serving 8.5 billion queries per day with...

CASE INTERVIEWHard

Google

3Frameworks

Framework

Has the cache hit rate degraded significantly?

Is the eviction policy causing premature key expiry?

Cache hit rate dropped from 94% to 31% over 12 minutes

LRU eviction triggered on 8 of 12 shards — max memory 92% utilized

Are hotkey collisions concentrating load on single shards?

Top 3 product SKUs drive 67% of cache reads — all hash to shard 4

Shard 4 CPU at 98% while remaining 11 shards average 31%

Is replication lag causing stale reads from replicas?

Primary-replica replication lag elevated?

Replica lag: 4.2 seconds (normal: <50ms) — reads serving stale prices

Write throughput increased 280% post Black Friday campaign launch

Is read-your-writes consistency violated for session data?

23% of checkout sessions see cart quantity revert after update

Sticky sessions disabled in load balancer 48 hours ago

Is network partitioning or node failure degrading cluster health?

Are cluster nodes experiencing partial network partitions?

2 of 12 Redis nodes reporting intermittent timeouts (AZ-3 subnet)

AZ-3 network maintenance window started 18 minutes ago

4Feedback

Distributed Systems Design

Distinctive

Scalability Reasoning

Strong

Tradeoff Quantification

Meeting Bar

Architectural Communication

Strong

Repeat

Practice Library

Google exercises

Design Google Search’s distributed index that serves 8.5 billion queries per day with...

CASE INTERVIEWHard

Technology · System DesignGoogle

A Google Spanner instance serving a globally distributed application is showing elevated...

LEARNHard

Technology · Distributed Systems DebuggingGoogle

Design YouTube’s video processing and delivery pipeline that ingests 500 hours of video...

LEARNHard

Technology · Media Pipeline ArchitectureGoogle

Tell me about a time you had to reason from first principles about a technical problem...

BEHAVIORALMedium

Behavioral · First-Principles ThinkingGoogle

Describe a system you designed where you had to explicitly trade off consistency for...

BEHAVIORALMedium

Behavioral · CAP Trade-offsGoogle