Comprehensive guide to system design interviews at top tech companies. Learn how to approach large-scale system design problems, design scalable architectures, and communicate your design decisions effectively to interviewers.

Essential reading for any developer preparing for system design interviews. This book provides a structured approach to tackling large-scale system design problems that you'll encounter at top tech companies. The book covers fundamental concepts like scalability, reliability, and performance, then walks through real-world examples of designing systems like Twitter, Uber, and YouTube. Each chapter includes step-by-step guidance on how to approach the problem, identify requirements, design the architecture, and communicate your decisions effectively. The book also covers important topics like load balancing, caching strategies, database design, and message queues. Whether you're interviewing for a senior engineer role or just want to understand how large-scale systems work, this book is invaluable.

Comprehensive guide to system design interviews with structured approaches, real-world examples, and step-by-step guidance for designing scalable architectures.

System Design Interview: Guide to Large-Scale Systems

System Design Interview – An insider's guide

The second volume in the System Design Interview series, diving deeper into advanced topics and more complex system design scenarios. Perfect companion to Volume 1 for comprehensive interview preparation.

Essential second volume that builds on the foundation of Volume 1. This book dives deeper into advanced system design topics and more complex scenarios you'll encounter in senior engineer interviews. Volume 2 covers additional real-world systems, explores more nuanced design trade-offs, and provides deeper insights into distributed systems concepts. The book includes new case studies and design patterns that complement the first volume perfectly. Together, these two volumes provide comprehensive coverage of everything you need to know for system design interviews at top tech companies. The advanced topics and complex scenarios make this particularly valuable for engineers targeting senior and staff engineer roles.

Advanced second volume with deeper system design topics, complex scenarios, and additional case studies perfect for senior and staff engineer interviews.

System Design Interview Volume 2: Advanced Systems Guide

System Design Interview – An Insider's Guide: Volume 2

Césarini and Vinoski's guide to building fault-tolerant systems with Erlang/OTP. Even if you never write Erlang, the mental models for fault-tolerance and concurrency are outstanding.

Designing for Scalability with Erlang/OTP is the book that changed how I think about fault tolerance. I don't write Erlang, but the mental models in this book—supervision trees, let it crash, process isolation—apply to any system that needs to be resilient. The chapter on supervision trees showed me why our microservices kept cascading failures: we weren't isolating failures properly, and one service going down took everything with it. The section on hot code swapping gave me ideas for zero-downtime deployments in other languages, and the chapter on distributed systems helped me understand why some architectures are more resilient than others. The book is technical—you'll need to understand concurrency and distributed systems—but the concepts are explained clearly. My only critique is that some of the Erlang-specific details won't apply if you're not using the language, but the principles are worth it. I've recommended it to developers working on distributed systems, and they've all said it helped them think about fault tolerance differently. Essential reading for anyone building systems that need to stay up.

Césarini and Vinoski's guide to fault-tolerant systems with Erlang/OTP. Supervision trees, process isolation, and let-it-crash. Patterns apply beyond Erlang.

Designing for Scalability with Erlang/OTP: Fault-Tolerant

Designing for Scalability with Erlang/OTP: Implement Robust, Fault-Tolerant Systems

Martin Kleppmann's definitive handbook on building reliable, scalable, maintainable data platforms. Covers the fundamentals of distributed systems, databases, and data processing that remain essential for modern architectures. Note: The second edition will be released on Tuesday, March 31, 2026 with updated content on streaming, CDC, compliance, and cloud patterns.

DDIA is still the first book I reach for when we're sketching a new data service. Kleppmann's first edition covers the timeless foundations—consistency models, replication strategies, partitioning, transactions, and the fundamental trade-offs that every distributed system designer faces. I've leaned on chapters about consensus algorithms, leader election, and eventual consistency while designing systems that need to scale, and it consistently surfaces edge cases we would have missed otherwise. The book remains dense, but the clear diagrams, research citations, and real-world examples make it easy to dive deeper when a topic touches your architecture. If you design data platforms or review distributed systems, keep this within reach. Note: A second edition with updated content on streaming, CDC, GDPR, and cloud patterns will be released on Tuesday, March 31, 2026 and can be preordered via <a href="https://amzn.to/4iCyOnM" title="Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems 2nd Edition on Amazon">Amazon</a>.

Martin Kleppmann's guide to distributed data systems. Covers consistency, replication, partitioning, and trade-offs for reliable, scalable platforms.

Designing Data-Intensive Applications: Big Ideas Guide

Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems

Discover the best distributed systems products and tools we actually use. Each item tested in real-world scenarios with honest, detailed reviews.

Distributed Systems Products

System Design Interview – An insider's guide

System Design Interview – An Insider's Guide: Volume 2

Designing for Scalability with Erlang/OTP: Implement Robust, Fault-Tolerant Systems

Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems