Grokking the System Design Interview

What the course covers

The course page lists 4 chapters, 82 lessons, 11 videos and 237 assessments, with about 20 hours of study time.

1. How to approach a system design interview (7 lessons): what the round tests, a step-by-step guide, functional versus non-functional requirements, back-of-the-envelope estimation, a master template and what to avoid.
2. System design trade-offs (24 lessons): latency versus throughput, horizontal versus vertical scaling, proxy versus reverse proxy, CDN versus direct serving, load balancer versus API gateway, token bucket versus leaky bucket, stateful versus stateless, serverless versus server-based, REST versus RPC, synchronous versus asynchronous communication and more.
3. System design problems (31 lessons): TinyURL, Pastebin, Instagram, Dropbox, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, YouTube or Netflix, typeahead suggestion, an API rate limiter, Twitter search, a web crawler, Facebook's news feed, Yelp or nearby friends, the Uber backend and Ticketmaster, each followed by a quiz.
4. Glossary of system design basics (20 lessons): the core concepts and building blocks referenced throughout.

Ratings and learners

As of September 2026 the course page shows a rating of 4.7 out of 5 from 62,728 ratings and 188,183 learners, making it one of the most taken system design courses online. It was updated within the last week.

What you actually learn

Not just the designs, but the procedure. Each problem follows the same flow: state the functional and non-functional requirements, estimate the scale, sketch the high-level design, then go deep on the two or three parts where the interesting trade-offs live. After several problems the first ten minutes become automatic, which frees your attention for the part of the round that carries the most weight.

How to get the most from it

• Read the approach chapter and the master template first, and use them on every problem.
• Attempt each design before reading it. Give yourself 30 to 45 minutes on paper or a whiteboard, speaking out loud, then compare.
• Work through the trade-offs chapter actively: at each comparison, decide which side you would pick for which requirement before reading on.
• Revisit two or three designs a week later from memory to check they stuck.
• Plan four to six weeks at an hour a day, including your own attempts.

What you will be able to do afterwards

Structure any open-ended design question, gather requirements and estimate scale, choose and justify components, discuss trade-offs clearly, and handle the classic designs interviewers ask most often.

Where it fits

If the building blocks feel unfamiliar, take System Design Fundamentals first. After this course, Advanced System Design Interview, Volume II covers harder problems and real systems such as Dynamo and Kafka, and the System Design Interview Playbook path sequences all of them. The free Grokking System Design repository on GitHub is the open companion to this course.

Buying and access

The course is paid: you can buy it once for lifetime access, or get it as part of an all-access subscription covering more than 40 courses. Prices shown depend on your region and current offers, so check the course page. A free preview lets you read the opening lessons first, and a certificate is issued on completion.

Common questions

Is it beginner friendly? It is marked beginner, though knowing the basic building blocks helps. The glossary chapter covers them.

Are there videos? Yes, 11 videos alongside the text lessons, diagrams and quizzes.

How long does it take? About 20 hours of material; more with practice.

Best for: engineers preparing for system design rounds who want a proven structure and the classic designs.