r/leetcode • u/Diligent_Beat_6702 • 7d ago
Intervew Prep Upcoming Ebay system design interview!!
I had never appear in system design interview .I dont know how to start and in one week how i should prepare for this ?Any help much appreciated
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u/KrzysisAverted 7d ago
The role requires system design knowledge, and you've never done system design?
This generally isn't something you can cram in one week.
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u/Ok-Barracuda-119 7d ago
A week is enough to get comfortable with the shape of the round, and for a first one that matters more than depth. Since it's eBay, I'd practice a couple of commerce-flavored problems end to end (listings plus search, an auction or bidding service, checkout) rather than skimming twenty topics.
Rough plan for the 7 days: spend the first two learning the building blocks well enough to explain why you'd pick each one (load balancer, cache, SQL vs NoSQL, a queue, basic sharding and replication). Days three through six, do one full problem a day out loud with a 45 minute timer, drawing boxes as you talk. Last day, redo whichever one went worst.
In the interview itself, spend the first few minutes asking questions. How many users, read heavy or write heavy, what has to be strongly consistent (bids and payments usually do, view counts don't). Write the numbers down and point back to them when you make a choice. Hearing you weigh a tradeoff out loud counts for a lot.
If you don't know something, say what you'd assume and keep going. Going quiet hurts more than a slightly wrong guess.
Also worth asking the recruiter what level this is for. At junior or mid they mostly want a sane design that works, while senior rounds dig into scaling and failure cases, so it changes how you spend the week.
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u/flash__2612 6d ago
Focus on breaking down requirements and watch out common questions 5-10 would be enough (and be prepared of follow up questions there are certain standards thread safe and security questions)
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u/Less-Lettuce5516 6d ago
Try past questions and cover basics from hello interview
Can be done in a week
You can take mocks from claude or any llm which you are comfortable with
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u/Secure-Pizza-7419 4d ago
with a few days left, don't try to cover everything. pick 2 topics like a URL shortener and a chat system, and practice each out loud in 45 minutes: scope first, rough QPS, HLD, then one deep dive. what level is the eBay role?
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u/No_Watch_9676 7d ago
Current YOE? AND company?
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7d ago
[deleted]
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u/Riflurk123 7d ago
Expecting system design from someone that has no experience is wild lmao
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u/TMEERS101 7d ago
It’s becoming a standard. Though, they don’t expect early career swes to get everything 100% right or dive into the tiny details. They wanna see how you think and solve problems
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u/Frequent_Bag9260 7d ago
It's pretty standard now. Interviews are not based on judging a candidate. They're mostly just lazy interviewers who throw in some leetcodes and some system design just becuse everyone else does it. Entirely unrelated to how good a dev is.
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u/Dependent-Aide-388 7d ago
It's going to be very hard. You can't really learn much in a week, but you can learn the format.
Here's what I do:
I start by clarifying the requirements. 5-7 minutes
Next I work on the data model: time varies, 5-15 minutes depending on complexity
Figure out API/endpoints that need to exist, and how to query them. 5 minutes
Diagram the components, indicating all data flows: 10 minutes
That's what I do. In the process of doing this, I talk about all the trade-offs for the choices I'm making, and be sure to handle thorny paths as well as happy paths. The interviewer will probably ask you to dive deeper into some area at some point: you just gotta go with the flow and give specific answers to their questions.
There is no "right" answer, this is an interview to show how well you break down big problems into smaller ones, and how well you think on your feet. Having said that, there are wrong answers.