System design resources for developers

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 free, open companion to the Grokking the System Design Interview course, published as a GitHub repository. It teaches a pattern-first approach: learn building blocks such as caching, sharding, replication and queues well enough that any design question becomes a matter of combining them. It includes a seven-step interview framework, 30 patterns, 59 question walkthroughs, company guides, cheat sheets and study roadmaps, all readable in the browser without an account.

• System design
• Job search

Chip Huyen's 2022 O'Reilly book on everything around the model: business framing, data engineering, training data, feature engineering, evaluation, deployment, distribution shift, monitoring, continual learning and MLOps infrastructure. It explains why models that score well in a notebook fail months after launch. It is for ML engineers, data scientists and engineers moving into ML who need to build systems that keep working in production.

• AI
• Machine learning
• System design
• DevOps

One-to-one coaching with the author of the best-selling Grokking courses, a tech lead whose background spans Meta, Microsoft and Hulu, where he built and scaled distributed systems and data storage infrastructure. Sessions cover system design, data structures and algorithms, interview strategy and career direction. It suits engineers who have prepared seriously and want an expert read on what is still holding them back.

• Career
• Job search
• System design

Coding and system design coaching with Rafay Abbasi, a co-founder of the platform and former senior development lead at Microsoft (Azure Storage) and software engineer lead at Meta, where he built large-scale systems. Sessions focus on distributed systems, scalable architecture, data structures and algorithms, and interview strategy. It suits senior engineers who keep reaching onsite rounds without converting them, or whose designs stay at the level of boxes and arrows.

• Career
• Job search
• System design

Live 60-minute mock interviews with engineers from large tech companies, covering system design, coding, behavioural rounds or a target company's format, with a verbal debrief and a prioritised list of fixes and drills. System design mocks are listed from $159, or $215 with an interviewer from your target company. It suits candidates with a real interview coming up who have never rehearsed under realistic, observed conditions.

• Career
• Job search
• System design

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

An Anthropic article from December 2024 that separates workflows (models run through fixed code paths) from agents (models directing their own steps) and describes the common patterns for each. It is for engineers designing any system with more than one model call. Its main lesson is to start with the simplest pattern that works and add autonomy only when the problem needs it.

• AI
• System design

Chip Huyen's O'Reilly book on building applications with foundation models such as LLMs, covering evaluation, prompt engineering, retrieval and agents, fine-tuning, dataset engineering, inference optimisation and system architecture. It is for engineers, data scientists and technical product managers who are moving an AI feature beyond the demo stage. It focuses on lasting fundamentals and decision-making rather than specific tools or code.

• AI
• Machine learning
• System design

A free, open source virtual whiteboard with a hand-drawn look that opens instantly in the browser with no account. You can sketch diagrams, share a live collaboration link, and export to PNG, SVG or JSON. It is widely used for system design interviews, architecture discussions and quick explanations. Practising your diagrams here before an interview means you spend the round thinking, not hunting for the arrow tool.

• System design

The original Grokking system design course, which made the design round learnable. It teaches a repeatable interview approach and the key trade-offs (SQL versus NoSQL, strong versus eventual consistency, REST versus RPC and more), then works through 15 classic designs such as a URL shortener, Instagram, Dropbox, Twitter, YouTube, a rate limiter, a web crawler, Uber and Ticketmaster, each with requirements, estimates and trade-off discussion.

• System design
• Job search
• Backend

A learning path that bundles five courses into one sequence for system design preparation: System Design Fundamentals, Grokking the System Design Interview, Advanced System Design Interview Volume II, Grokking Microservices Design Patterns and Grokking Design Patterns for Engineers and Managers. Together they add up to 76 chapters and 666 lessons. It suits engineers who want a complete, ordered curriculum instead of assembling one from scattered posts.

• System design
• Job search
• Career

A beginner-friendly, text-based course on the building blocks every system design is assembled from: scalability and availability, back-of-the-envelope estimation, networking and DNS, proxies, load balancers, API gateways, rate limiting, caching, CDNs, partitioning, replication, CAP and PACELC, SQL and NoSQL databases, indexes and distributed patterns such as quorum and heartbeats. Start here if full design walkthroughs feel like they assume knowledge you do not have.

• System design
• Backend
• CS fundamentals

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 the recurring patterns behind scalable systems, more than 60 of them, taught through one continuous story of an online store growing from a single database to 100 million users. It covers communication, storage, caching, reliability, scaling, consistency, APIs and the edge, observability, batch and streaming, and a module on AI-era infrastructure such as LLM gateways, semantic caching, RAG pipelines and GPU serving. No distributed systems background is needed.

• System design
• Backend

A course on the judgment behind microservices in a system design round: when to choose them over a monolith, how to draw service boundaries, how services communicate, how to handle failure and keep data consistent, and how microservices run in production. It ends with full interview scenarios and a rapid-review question bank. Every lesson closes with a speakable 30-second answer and likely follow-ups. It suits engineers who need to discuss microservice trade-offs convincingly.

• System design
• Backend
• DevOps

A course on the named patterns that make microservice architectures workable: strangler fig, API gateway, backends for frontends, service discovery, circuit breaker, bulkhead, retry, sidecar, service mesh, database per service, saga, transactional outbox, event-driven architecture, CQRS, event sourcing and externalised configuration. Each pattern starts with the problem it solves and the cost it adds, with short Java examples. It suits developers and aspiring architects working with, or moving towards, service-based systems.

• System design
• Backend
• DevOps

An intermediate course on how systems scale in practice: caching, load balancing, API design, databases, sharding, messaging and streaming, consistency and replication, observability, security, networking, storage, reliability, and time and IDs. It is designed as the next step after Grokking the System Design Interview and System Design Fundamentals, focusing on the trade-offs between consistency, latency and availability that senior-level answers are judged on.

• System design
• Backend

A 14-day course built around a 14-step framework for the system design round, from scoping and requirements through estimation, API design, data modelling, caching, scaling, reliability and bottlenecks. Each day applies the framework to a group of real systems, more than 30 in all, including YouTube, WhatsApp, Uber, Stripe, ChatGPT, Google Search, a distributed rate limiter and a job scheduler. It suits engineers with a design round a few weeks away who need structure and breadth quickly.

• System design
• Job search

A free, browsable collection of system design lessons that opens with a roadmap for learning system design by career level. It covers the fundamentals (distributed system characteristics, networking, DNS, load balancing, API design, caching, partitioning, CAP, databases, indexes), trade-offs, how to approach a design interview, and walkthroughs of classic problems. It works as a reference while you practise and as a sample of the teaching style before choosing a course.

• System design
• Backend

An interactive practice tool for system design questions: you work through a real-world design step by step on a whiteboard and receive AI-powered feedback on your answer. Your practice sessions are saved with their status, so you can return to them and review results. It fills the gap most preparation leaves open, which is actually producing designs under realistic conditions rather than only reading worked answers.

• System design
• Job search

A text based course on designing APIs the way strong engineers are asked to in design rounds: REST done properly, when gRPC, GraphQL, WebSockets and webhooks fit, idempotency, rate limiting, authentication, versioning and caching, plus APIs for AI products. It works through 15 complete API designs, from a URL shortener and payments to chat, booking and LLM inference, for backend engineers facing an API design round.

• Web
• Backend
• System design

A beginner friendly, text based course on relational database design: data modelling, entity relationship diagrams, keys and integrity constraints, functional dependencies and normalisation up to BCNF and beyond. It finishes with nine case studies, from hospital and bank systems to an Instagram style app, e-commerce and ticket booking. For developers and students who want to design schemas that stay pleasant to work with years later.

• Web
• Databases
• System design
• Backend

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