Goldman Sachs DevOps System Design & Architecture interview questions

The default answer is 'horizontal' because interviews reward it. The correct answer names the constraint that makes distribution expensive and knows when one big machine is the engineering choice.

Timeouts guarantee uncertainty, not failure: the first request may have succeeded after the client gave up. The idempotency key pattern is the industry answer; the scored details are storage, expiry and concurrency.

Flags sit on the request path of everything, so a slow flag service is a site-wide outage waiting to happen. Local snapshots, propagation numbers and audit trails are where this design is decided, because they determine what happens when the flag service itself is unavailable.

Never-delete is a policy, not a control. Auditors and attackers both want to know what stops an admin with broad credentials, and the answer has to be mechanical.

Leases prevent dead holders but not overlapping ones. The staff-level answer is fencing tokens and a candid account of why quorum lock services without downstream checks are still probabilistic.

This is a platform-organization question disguised as infrastructure. Score comes from separating enforcement from ownership and explaining what stops the gateway becoming a smart ESB.

Cron fires at wall-clock times; a scheduler reasons about data intervals and blocked frontiers. The scored details are per-partition idempotency and catch-up semantics.

The auditor does not require a meeting, they require evidence that changes are authorised, tested and reversible. Generate that evidence from the pipeline and the board stops being the bottleneck.

An untested backup is a belief, not a control. The design that matters is the one that restores automatically on a schedule and verifies the result, because that is the only thing that produces a recovery time you can quote.

The Indian e-commerce interview question, and autoscaling is the wrong first answer. A 10x spike arriving in seconds outruns any scaling loop, so the design has to absorb rather than scale.

The design round where the honest answer is mostly about data. Stateless traffic across regions is straightforward; the database is where active-active is either solved or pretended.

The Google-style NALSD round in miniature. The boxes are easy; what is being scored is whether the numbers fall out of Little's law before you draw them.

Drawing an agent that polls a server is the easy third. The interview is about partial applies, fleet-versus-world state, and why rollback must be a pointer flip, never a reverse edit.

Stateless does not mean there is no state. It means the state is not in the instance, which is what lets you kill any instance at any time. Every scaling and deployment property people want depends on that one thing.

It converts a synchronous failure into a delay. That is the whole benefit and the whole cost, because the caller now gets an answer before the work has happened and somebody has to tell them when it did.

The classic napkin-math question. The number in the prompt is the question. Drawing the architecture before doing the arithmetic produces a design the physics forbids, and the arithmetic takes a minute.

The migration question, and the trap is answering with a target architecture. What is being scored is sequencing: how you get there without a rewrite and without a release freeze.

Every candidate says replication and failover. The scoring answer names the replication mode, states the resulting data loss window, and explains how the cluster avoids two primaries.

Everyone names token bucket. The scored part is the rest: drift between nodes, the 429 contract with clients, and whether your quota service should fail open or closed.

The catalog is the easy half. The scored half is stampede dynamics: one hot key expiring can multiply origin load by a thousand in a second, and there are three distinct fixes.

Cron is the most-deployed scheduler on earth and the worst-behaved at scale. The scored content is everything crontab cannot do: exactly-once firing, thundering herds, and what happens when the scheduler itself dies.

CAP is not a menu of two letters per system. The scored answer knows what the theorem claims (narrowly), what most engineers misquote, and what a split-brain costs when both halves accept writes.

The most rehearsed design question, which is exactly why the interesting parts are the ones blog posts skip: redirect semantics, key generation under failure, and analytics kept off the hot path.

Outbound delivery looks like a queue and a loop until one subscriber hangs for sixty seconds and takes your workers with it. Isolation, retry horizons, and signatures are where the marks are.