Post by Shaurya Pratap Singh

SDE-2 at Microsoft | Ex-Salesforce, Ex-Amazon | ICPC Regionalist

🚀 Want to get better at System Design? After working as a Software Engineer at Amazon , Salesforce , and Microsoft , one thing I’ve realized is this: The best engineers don’t just know system design concepts, they understand how real systems actually work. If you’re preparing for product companies, these are some of the best topics to study, along with free YouTube resources 👇 1️⃣ How Stock Exchange Works Low latency, matching engines, fault tolerance 🎥 https://lnkd.in/gCXk-Pti 2️⃣ How Payment Systems Work Transactions, idempotency, consistency, fraud handling 🎥 https://lnkd.in/gxmrEKS4 3️⃣ How YouTube Works Video storage, CDN, encoding pipelines, scaling 🎥 https://lnkd.in/gWFXwe67 4️⃣ How Google Docs Works Real-time collaboration, CRDTs, sync conflicts 🎥 https://lnkd.in/g-iF2XVm 5️⃣ How Kafka Works Event streaming, partitions, brokers, replication 🎥 https://lnkd.in/gBiu9ePG 6️⃣ How URL Shortener Works Database design, hashing, scaling 🎥 https://lnkd.in/gHmAvbHY 7️⃣ How WhatsApp Works Message queues, delivery guarantees, presence systems 🎥 https://lnkd.in/g-iF2XVm 8️⃣ How Airbnb Works Marketplace scaling, booking workflows 🎥 Search in the above playlist 9️⃣ How Spotify Works Music streaming architecture, caching 🎥 Search “Spotify System Design” in the same playlist 🔟 How Slack Works Chat architecture, WebSockets, event-driven systems 🎥 Search “Slack System Design” in the same playlist 1️⃣1️⃣ How Reddit Works Feed generation, ranking, caching 🎥 Search “Reddit System Design” in the same playlist 1️⃣2️⃣ How Uber Finds Nearby Drivers Geospatial indexing, proximity search 🎥 https://lnkd.in/gGcy4s3V 1️⃣3️⃣ How Amazon S3 Works Distributed storage, replication, durability 🎥 https://lnkd.in/gZbQ5Q4M 1️⃣4️⃣ How LLM Systems (like ChatGPT) Work Inference scaling, model serving, pipelines 🎥 https://lnkd.in/gZbQ5Q4M 💡 Don’t just watch the videos. ✅ Pause frequently ✅ Draw the architecture from memory ✅ Identify bottlenecks ✅ Think about trade-offs and alternative designs That’s where real learning happens. In my experience interviewing and working at Amazon, Salesforce, and Microsoft, strong system design isn’t about throwing around buzzwords, it’s about making the right engineering trade-offs. Go deep into even 6–7 of these systems, and you’ll be ahead of most candidates walking into system design interviews. 📌 Save this post and share it with someone preparing for top product companies. Follow Shaurya Pratap Singh for more.

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