The interview process included:

• 1 call (15 minutes)
• 3 onsite interviews (45 minutes each, with manager, teammates, and others)
• 1 take-home assignment (approximately 3-6 hours)

The process was a little lengthy, so keep that in mind when timing offers. Otherwise, there was transparent communication, and everyone was great to chat with.

Describe some ways in which you would scale a system.

There are several common approaches to scaling a system:

• Horizontal Scaling (Scaling Out): This involves adding more machines or nodes to a system. Instead of making a single machine more powerful, you distribute the workload across multiple, often identical, machines. This is typically achieved through techniques like load balancing, which directs incoming requests to available servers.

• Vertical Scaling (Scaling Up): This means increasing the capacity of existing machines. This could involve adding more CPU, RAM, or faster storage to a server. While simpler to implement initially, vertical scaling has physical and cost limitations.

• Database Scaling: Databases can be scaled in various ways. Replication creates copies of the database, allowing read operations to be distributed. Sharding partitions data across multiple database instances, enabling both read and write operations to be scaled horizontally.

• Caching: Implementing caching layers, such as in-memory caches (e.g., Redis, Memcached) or content delivery networks (CDNs), can significantly reduce the load on primary data stores and application servers by serving frequently accessed data quickly.

• Asynchronous Processing/Queuing: Offloading non-critical or time-consuming tasks to background workers via message queues (e.g., RabbitMQ, Kafka) prevents the main application from being blocked and improves responsiveness. This allows the system to handle a higher volume of requests by processing them asynchronously.

• Microservices Architecture: Breaking down a monolithic application into smaller, independent services allows individual services to be scaled independently based on their specific load requirements. This also improves fault isolation and development agility.