Prepare for a system design interview
Builds a practice plan and a worked approach for system design questions, tailored to the level and company type you're targeting.
The prompt
Help me prepare for a system design interview.
Target role and level: [e.g. "senior backend engineer"]
Company type: [e.g. "large tech company", "fintech startup", "B2B SaaS"]
Interview date: [DATE]
My background: [SYSTEMS I'VE BUILT, SCALE I'VE WORKED AT, AREAS I'M WEAK IN]
Format if known: [LENGTH, WHITEBOARD OR ONLINE TOOL, WHAT THE RECRUITER SAID]
Give me:
1. A repeatable framework for the interview hour, with rough timings: clarify requirements and non-functional needs, estimate scale, define APIs and data model, high-level design, deep dive on 1-2 components, trade-offs and bottlenecks, wrap-up.
2. Core concepts to review, prioritized by my weak areas: e.g. load balancing, caching, database choice and sharding, replication and consistency, queues and async processing, rate limiting, idempotency, observability.
3. 8 practice questions suited to the company type, from easier to harder, each with the 2-3 key trade-offs an interviewer is looking for.
4. One fully worked example of a question at my level, showing what I'd say and draw at each stage.
5. Level signals: what distinguishes a senior answer from a mid-level one (driving the conversation, quantifying, naming trade-offs, operational concerns).
6. A day-by-day study plan up to my interview date.
Then offer to run a mock interview: you play the interviewer, ask one question, let me answer step by step, and give feedback against the framework.
Highlighted [brackets] are blanks to replace with your own details.
Fill in the blanks and use this promptMore Career & Job Search prompts
What to fill in
- e.g. "senior backend engineer"
- e.g. "large tech company", "fintech startup", "B2B SaaS"
- DATE
- SYSTEMS I'VE BUILT, SCALE I'VE WORKED AT, AREAS I'M WEAK IN
- LENGTH, WHITEBOARD OR ONLINE TOOL, WHAT THE RECRUITER SAID
How this prompt is built
This prompt follows the Few-Shot structure (Few-shot prompting). A few-shot prompt includes one or more worked examples of the input and the output you want, so the model can copy the pattern instead of guessing it.
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