Design Software Systems Like a Senior Engineer – Complete Course

Learn software system design and pass interviews. This course provides a practical five-step framework for structuring your thinking and tackling vague requirements under pressure. Additionally, the course walks through real-world examples, designing systems similar to Spotify, Booking.com, WhatsApp from scratch.

Course from @hayk.simonyan

Become a senior software engineer with a job guarantee: https://hayksimonyan.com/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=video&utm_campaign=177-system-design-interview-guide&utm_content=august-2026

Timestamps:
- 0:00:00 Why System Design Matters

Section 1: System Design Framework
- 0:02:16 Interview Formats Overview
- 0:09:14 The 5 Step Framework
18:24 Tradeoffs and Extensions

Section 2: System #1
- 0:23:55 Requirements and Capacity Planning
- 0:29:24 Architecture and Data Flows
- 0:35:23 API Design
- 0:40:04 Storage and Schema Design
- 0:44:37 Scaling to Millions

Section 3: System #2
- 0:50:52 Non-Functional Targets
- 0:58:22 Capacity Math and Architecture
- 1:11:02 API Design and Idempotency
- 1:22:34 Data Modeling and Inventory Logic
- 1:33:05 Concurrency and Race Conditions
- 1:34:44 Sharding, Caching and Scaling
- 1:40:41 Search at Scale (Elasticsearch)
- 1:45:19 Replication and Global Routing

Section 4: System #3
- 1:50:45 Scale Estimation
- 1:56:38 Architecture and Real Time Communication
- 2:07:04 Data Modeling and API Flows
- 2:13:10 Multi Device Sync and Offline Delivery
- 2:22:37 Fanout, Media Storage and CDN Delivery
- 2:31:44 Event Driven Architecture and Batch Processing
- 2:39:18 Encryption and Rate Limiting
- 2:49:45 Sharding and Cleanup Jobs
- 2:57:53 Failure Handling and Global Scaling
- 3:09:08 Feature Flags and Rollouts

- 3:11:14 How to Actually Get Better

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