Ming Dao School

How to Prepare for System Design Interviews

Tue, 01 Feb 2022 18:33:02 -0800

When software companies hire experienced engineers from the industry, they often test the candidate for their system design skills. Here are a few ways you can prepare for it.

Assess Your Knowledge

Ming Dao School conducts system design interviews every week. We publish our notes

here. Review the questions asked, do your own design, and compare it with the notes.

Learn

Read the engineering blogs of software companies.
Research the statistics of different products to understand the requirements.
YouTube videos of design interview questions.
Read the book

Designing Data-Intensive Application

Read

System Design Primer on Github

Join the weekly System Design Mock Interview events hosted by Ming Dao School. Our calendar is available

here.

Practice with Mock System Design Interviews

Join our Mock System Design Interview as interviewer and interviewee.
Contact our coach for private 1-1 training on job preparation and mock interviews.

Engineering Career in FAANG versus Smaller High Growth Companies

Sun, 28 Nov 2021 00:47:21 -0800

FAANG is the acronym for high tech companies Meta (Facebook), Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google. As a software engineer exploring job opportunities, should we join a FAANG company or a smaller, but higher growth company?

Ming Dao School invited Yu Liu, engineering manager, Pinterest and ex-Googler, to discuss her career journey, and give us an insider's view of the career growth in both types of companies.

Three Steps to Make a Design Interview More Efficient

Tue, 09 Nov 2021 17:15:44 -0800

学不学，复众人之所过 - 春秋战国老子《道德经》

Study what others ignore, and learn how others fail. - Tao Te Ching, Lao Tse, 500BC

Since early October 2021, we have been regularly conducting mock system design interviews online. Every Sunday since then, more than 100 engineers have joined us. These events have given us ways to develop our design skills and opportunities to find ways to improve ourselves when communicating under time pressure. We learned a few lessons along the way.

The usual steps for a system design interview are:

collecting functional requirements
collecting nonfunctional requirements
designing architecture and API

Under time pressure, interviewees have often skipped some details, but the missing information cost them even more time during the interview. I highlighted them in green in the following diagram.

Here are the lessons that we learned.

Clarify essential design expectations; do not over-engineer.
How we learned it: When we conducted a mock interview on metrics system design, the interviewee assumed that the interviewer required the creation of three backend subsystems: logging, visualization, alerting, whereas the interviewer initially only planned to ask about visualization.

Collect requirements on traffic and storage when gathering nonfunctional requirements.
How we learned it: When we conducted a mock interview on payment system design, the interviewee dived deep into system design without clarifying the traffic and storage requirements upfront. The interview flow was interrupted when the interviewee covered the database design. At that point, the interviewee went back to gather traffic and storage requirements to validate that the plan could...Read More

Job Opportunity in AWS Console Platform, Amazon

Thu, 21 Oct 2021 18:27:58 -0700

A friend, engineering manager in AWS Console Platform, Amazon, let us know that there are opportunities for experienced engineers to join the team. They are primarily hiring for their Washington DC location, but they are also open to remote engineers on a case-by-case basis. The ideal candidate is SDEIII/senior SDE. They have both frontend and backend openings.

You can contact us on WeChat or LinkedIn for more information on the opening, and addition programs to help you better prepared.

The following content is from the original job post for our reader's convenience. There are a number of related positions. You are always welcome to directly apply to the position through their original posts.

DESCRIPTION

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is growing rapidly–millions of customers from independent developers to large enterprises visit our management console.

The AWS User Experience Products & Platform team is responsible for products that enable AWS users to manage their applications and infrastructure on AWS. Our mission is to deliver an effective, and loved user experience that makes it easy for all users to discover, learn, and build on AWS. Today, we own the AWS Management Console, the AWS Console Mobile App, the AWS Chatbot, and the User Experience Platform used by 175+ AWS...Read More

Job Opportunity in Azure OneFleet, Microsoft

Thu, 21 Oct 2021 18:15:03 -0700

A friend, engineering manager in Azure OneFleet, Microsoft, let us know that there are opportunities for experienced engineers to join the team.

You can contact us on WeChat or LinkedIn for more information on the opening, and addition programs to help you better prepared.

The following content is from the original job post for our reader's convenience. There are a number of related positions. You are always welcome to directly apply to the position through their original posts.

Azure Compute is Azure's most profitable business and is growing incredibly fast! We provide millions of virtual machines for customers to run their workloads in the cloud. We are a globally available foundational service that hosts services with the scale of Bing, Skype, and SQL Azure. Customers use the power of Azure Compute to host millions of multiplayer gaming sessions and solve large computational problems in seconds. Workloads range from new “born-in-the-cloud” services to traditional applications migrated from physical datacenters.

The Azure OneFleet team is the “kernel” of the Microsoft Compute Cloud. We build a fault tolerant distributed system on top of commodity datacenter hardware to deliver an infrastructure for hosting cloud applications on both physical and virtual servers. We create an illusion that resources are limitless, infinitely elastic, and...Read More

Job Opportunity in Data Flow Service, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

Thu, 21 Oct 2021 17:30:09 -0700

A friend of mine, engineering director in Data Flow Service, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), let us know that there are opportunities for experienced engineers to join the team.

You can contact us on WeChat or LinkedIn for more information on the opening, and addition programs to help you better prepared.

Job Description

At Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), we build the future of the cloud for Enterprises as a diverse team of fellow creators and inventors. We act with the speed and attitude of a start-up, with the scale and customer-focus of the leading enterprise software company in the world.

Values are OCI’s foundation and how we deliver excellence. We iterate and improve based on the data and customer feedback. We are constantly learning and taking opportunities to grow our careers and ourselves. We challenge each other to stretch...Read More

Four Signs of a Supportive Manager

Thu, 21 Oct 2021 16:44:06 -0700

How can we tell if our manager supports our success and growth?

A friend of mine who experienced many manager changes gave me some tips. Our manager's support can show up in four critical aspects of our work.

The manager is transparent about priorities among projects in the team.
The manager gives us high impact and high priority projects.
The manager gets us the needed resource for success, such as human resources, needed time for the project, or budget for the right tools and equipment.
The manager gives us visibility and credit for our accomplishments.

A manager who is not supportive can do the complete reverse of the above.

The manager hides the team priorities from us.
The manager consistently requires us to work on low-priority projects.
The manager does not provide us with the needed time and resources.
After we complete a project, the manager gives credit to somebody else.

When we find a new job, we should find a supportive manager and team. As soon as we join, we need to set up a career plan and build trust with our new manager. This way, we hopefully avoid running into a situation where our managers do not support our development and success.

What can we do if we get into a situation where our manager is not supportive? Many people immediately consider finding another job. However, there are better ways to resolve them, leading to stronger relations and a better work environment.

Improve ourselves: Try our best to understand the need of the team, and see if there are better ways to work and contribute.
Talk to our manager. Every 1-1 meeting opportunity with our manager is valuable for us to build trust and relations our manager. We can collect suggestions to make the team more successful, volunteer what we can do, and advice what we like...Read More

Job Opportunity in Pinterest

Wed, 20 Oct 2021 23:03:41 -0700

A friend of mine, engineering manager in Pinterest, let us know that there are opportunities for experienced engineers to join the Pinterest Cloud Runtime Team.

If you want to apply for this position and other positions from the friend and alumni network of Ming Dao School, please submit your information here. We will help connect great candidates with the hiring managers.

The following content is from Pinterest's original job post for our reader's convenience. You are always welcome to directly apply to the position through their original post.

Pinterest’s Cloud Runtime team provides a foundation of cloud platform that powers 400M+ users, serving tens of billions of pins each day. As a software engineer on this team, you’ll work on cloud resource management, scheduling and deploying frameworks, Linux container and orchestration on public clouds, as well as the implementation of common key features such as job scheduling, deployment, and dynamic configurations.

What you’ll do

Build deploy platform to help developers to build scalable, high-performance cloud platform with high productivity.
Build cutting edge cloud native cloud infrastructure and platform on open public clouds.
Optimize existing systems/services to improve performance and efficiency.
Work with service developers closely to understand...Read More

How to Succeed in a System Design Interview

Fri, 15 Oct 2021 17:20:20 -0700

Software development companies often test their industry candidates for system design skills during interviews.

We invited a senior engineer and manager (L5/SDEIII), from a FAANG company, to conduct a mock system design interview at our event. We also invited an experienced developer and individual contributor (L4/SDEII) from another FAANG company as the interviewee. More than a hundred software developers joined our event.

Our interview took an hour. It was pretty different from many learning materials online, such as YouTube videos covering system design interviews. Here are a few of the key differences:

After the interview portion of our online event, our interviewer let us know some of the essential soft and hard skills he looks for in a candidate. ( To be clear, these are NOT official FAANG interview rubrics, but a high-level summary of the interviewer's experience interviewing for different companies and projects)

Soft skills:

Gathering requirements
Making decisions and justifying tradeoffs
Describing the solution using concise language and accurate technical terms

Hard skills:

Design quality: scalability, reliability, efficiency (L4/SDE II, L5/SDE III)
Essential facts about existing software solutions and hardware capabilities (L4/SDE II, L5/SDE III)
Project lifecycle...Read More

Job Opportunities for Apple Siri ML/AI

Thu, 07 Oct 2021 01:22:03 -0700

A friend of mine, senior engineering manager, is hiring software development engineers for the data infrastructure team for Apple Siri ML/AI in Seattle.

We have a free weekly system design mock interview to help you better prepared. You can contact us on WeChat or LinkedIn for more information.

The work is critical to the success of Apple. The openings require a few years of work experience in scalable data infrastructure.

https://jobs.apple.com/en-us/details/200211554/ai-ml-data-infrastructure-engineer-machine-learning-platform-and-technologies?team=MLAI

https://jobs.apple.com/en-us/details/200265921/ai-ml-data-infrastructure-stream-processing-engineer-machine-learning-platform-technologies?team=MLAI

If you are interested to apply for the openings, please use this form to submit your information. We will send qualified candidates to the hiring manager.