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Number 2 tip: Every system design question has a point of contention. Is it storage? Latency? Where will the system start to break? This is pivotal to figure out asap.

Basic structure:

Requirements (functional / non-functional)

Estimations (focus on contention point)

System API

Data model

High level design (core components)

Detailed design (ask where to dive in)

Bottlenecks (scale, redundancy, SPOFs, metrics, logs, alerts, dashboards, pagerduty, deployment, failure scenarios)

As staff level interviewee, you are expected to lead the interview and provide alternatives, weigh pros & cons of each approach and commit to one with justification. Outside of typical system design topics, staff level also needs to consider costs, system complexity, and business aspects (e.g. CDN too expensive for free tier).

For most interviewers, you should be familiar with at least one database technology for each category (key value, document, columnar, relational, etc). For Google, they typically want you to design from fundamentals instead of using off the shelf technologies.

Number 3 tip: Listen intently to interviewer when they speak and take their hints.