System Design with AI Interview Guide : Designing Scalable, Agentic, and Defensible Systems
by Rohit Bhardwaj
Introduction
System Design with AI Interview Guide
The Friday Night Failure
The first time I realized system design was more than a resume filler, I was 26 and on call for an online ticketing platform. It was a Friday night release. We had load-tested all week. Everything looked fine until traffic exceeded roughly 24,000 concurrent users. Then the payment API slowed, stalled, and finally flat-lined.
By midnight, the immediate bug was fixed, but the damage was already done. Finance was furious. Customers had left. And the system felt fragile enough that nobody wanted to touch it again.
What stayed with me was not only the bug. It was the fear. We were afraid to change the system because we did not really understand it.
Years later, I found similar ideas ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access