Zarish Khalid

When interviewers ask you to design a distributed logging system, they are not testing whether you know the internals of Elasticsearch or can recite the Kafka API. They are testing

Designing Slack is a popular System Design interview problem because it tests a candidate’s ability to reason about real-time systems at scale. Unlike simpler CRUD-based applications, Slack introduces challenges such

When you are asked to design Google Calendar, interviewers are not testing whether you can store events in a database. They are testing whether you can reason about time, collaboration,

When you are asked to design Pastebin in a System Design interview, the interviewer is not testing whether you understand Pastebin as a product. They are testing whether you can

A strong architecture is not a giant diagram. It is a set of deliberate choices: what to build first, what to postpone, what to standardize, and what risks you’re willing

Security-focused rounds are rarely about listing OWASP items. They are about showing that you can reason from threats to controls, draw explicit trust boundaries, and build systems that stay safe

Cloud-focused rounds look familiar on the surface: clarify requirements, draw boxes, pick a database, and talk about scaling. The difference is that the interviewer is evaluating whether you can reason

When you’re asked to do a back-of-the-envelope calculation in a System Design interview, the interviewer is not testing whether you remember formulas. They are watching how you think under uncertainty.

Agentic System Design refers to architecting systems in which AI agents operate with a degree of autonomy to pursue goals, make decisions, and take actions over time. In a System

When an interviewer asks you to explain or design ZooKeeper, they are not asking you to build a CRUD service or a coordination wrapper around a database. They are testing