Head of Engineering

A free newsletter of short, focused posts on system design and problem solving, from the team behind the Grokking courses. Recent posts cover company interview processes (such as OpenAI and Anthropic roles), the most asked mobile system design questions and preparation plans, each linking to a fuller article on the blog. It suits engineers who want a steady, low-effort way to keep system design and interview topics fresh between deeper study sessions.

• System design
• DSA

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 course on AI system design interviews, from classic ML systems such as recommendations, ranking and fraud detection to LLM serving costs, RAG, generative AI products and agentic systems, with a repeatable framework and full case studies. It takes about 20 hours across 9 chapters. It suits engineers who can write code and know what a model, an API and a database are, and are facing design rounds that now include AI.

• AI
• System design
• Job search

A browsable practice library of coding problems that can be filtered by pattern, data structure, difficulty and company, so you can drill exactly the weakness you found this week. Patterns include two pointers, sliding window, hash maps, stacks, backtracking and greedy algorithms, with company filters for Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle and LinkedIn. Free to browse, with an in-browser editor and solutions.

• Job search
• DSA

A free GitHub link hub by Arpit Adlakha covering data structures and algorithms, low-level design and high-level system design. It gathers pattern write-ups for dynamic programming, sliding window and binary search, video lectures, practice sites, low-level design questions with solutions, system design reading and database design articles. It is a directory rather than original teaching material, last updated in December 2024.

• Job search
• DSA
• System design

The OWASP Gen AI Security Project's peer-reviewed list of the ten most critical security risks for AI agents, published in December 2025: goal hijack, tool misuse, identity and privilege abuse, agentic supply chain, unexpected code execution, memory poisoning and more, each with real incidents and mitigations. Free.

• AI
• System design
• Backend