Design Gurus
Builds online courses for software engineers, including Grokking the Coding Interview and Grokking the System Design Interview, and runs a large engineering community across LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram and X.
Redmond, Washington, United States
Not known
Remote
Occasional openings
A few roles a year, usually replacements rather than growth.No careers page on file yet. Try their LinkedIn or the job boards below.
Internship or fresh graduate programmeLinkedInWebsiteSmall team; roles and internships are posted on LinkedIn as they open.
Open internships
How they hire
The hiring process for this company is not written up here yet. Rather than guess at it, the page says so until it has sourced detail to show.
If you have interviewed here, you know more about it than anyone who has written about it. Send me the rounds and this section becomes real.
Worth reading before you apply
From the Sefism resource library, matched to the rounds above.
A course on concurrency for interviews: processes and threads, race conditions and critical sections, the five synchronisation constructs (mutexes, read/write locks, semaphores, condition variables, barriers), and 17 threading problems from parallel search to the Dining Philosophers and a multithreaded web crawler. Code is in Python, Java, C++ and C#. It suits backend and senior candidates who have avoided concurrency and expect it in their loop.
- Job search
- CS fundamentals
- Backend
A SQL course for interviews that reviews the basics, order of execution, functions, subqueries, joins, set operations, DDL and DML, then works through 69 interview problems graded easy to hard plus 14 unguided test problems, run against a live database in the browser. It suits backend, data and analytics candidates whose SQL stops at a simple inner join, or who need a fast refresher before a SQL round.
- Job search
- Databases
- Backend
The second volume of Grokking the System Design Interview, aimed at senior and staff (L5/L6) design rounds. It works through harder case studies such as a payment system, flash sale, notification service, unique ID generator, Gmail, Reddit, Google Calendar and a code judging system, then goes beneath them with patterns like quorum, write-ahead logs and vector clocks and deep dives into Dynamo, Cassandra, Kafka, Chubby, HDFS, GFS and BigTable.
- System design
- Backend
- Job search
A text-based course on how databases work underneath: storage and page layout, indexing, transactions and ACID, concurrency control, partitioning and sharding, replication and consistency, consensus and leader election, recovery, and the main NoSQL families. It ends with case studies designing the databases behind Quora, TikTok, Airbnb and Snapchat. It suits engineers who want their database choices in system design answers to be defensible rather than hand-waved.
- System design
- Databases
- Backend
- Job search
A quick-revision companion to the Sefism full stack roadmap in seven chapters: web foundations, Git, npm and React, the server side, data modelling, APIs with authentication and caching, deployment with CI/CD, Linux and AWS, and shipping a complete product. It comes in Next.js, MERN, Django and React, and Spring Boot and React editions, so the server and database chapters match your stack. Skim a chapter before a project or a technical conversation, and use it as a checklist before you ship.
- Web
- Frontend
- Backend
- Databases
A seven-stage plan for building and running a complete web product on your own, in Next.js, MERN, Django with React, or Spring Boot with React: web foundations, Git and React, the server side, data modelling in PostgreSQL or MongoDB, APIs with authentication and caching, deployment to Linux or AWS with CI/CD, and one shipped product with real users. It suits developers who want to own a product end to end. By the end you can model data, build a secure API and UI, deploy it and ship every change through a pipeline.
- Web
- Frontend
- Backend
- Databases
What it pays
Nothing collected for this company yet, and nothing worth guessing at. A made-up range is worse than no range because people negotiate against it.
Roles they hire
Universities they recruit from
No sourced university links yet. A campus drive, a career fair appearance or an internship partnership is what puts a university here.
About Design Gurus
What they do
Design Gurus makes self-paced courses for software engineers on coding patterns, system design, object-oriented design and related topics. The best-known titles are Grokking the Coding Interview and Grokking the System Design Interview. The courses were put together by engineers and managers who worked at large tech companies.
The team
A small, remote team led by co-founders Arslan Ahmad (CEO) and Abdul Rafay Abbasi (CTO), with engineers working from Pakistan. The company is registered in Redmond, Washington.
Working with them
Work is remote. Roles open occasionally rather than in fixed batches, and internships are announced on LinkedIn and listed on Sefism.
Sources
- Design Gurus websiteread 2026-09-29
- Design Gurus team pageread 2026-09-29
- Design Gurus on LinkedInread 2026-09-29
Whole profile last checked 2026-09-29.
Interviewed at Design Gurus? Nobody has written this one up.
There is no public account of how this company hires, so this page has a careers link and not much else. One description of the rounds you sat would make it genuinely useful to the next person.
Want me to refer you here?
Send me the role, your CV and a few honest paragraphs on why you fit it. Where I know someone inside and your profile matches, I will make the introduction. Where I cannot, I will tell you why and point you at the route that does work. You get an answer either way.
Stuck on something specific?
Writing only gets you so far. If you want an answer to your situation rather than the general case, book a session and we will work through it together. Sessions are free for approved Sefism members, and a few slots open each week.
Follow along
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