🧩Skill assessment · 35 questions

System Design skill assessment

Tradeoffs, not buzzwords.

Take the assessment →🧑‍🏫 Learn hands-onProfessional→

What it covers

Scalability

Master techniques for scaling systems horizontally and removing bottlenecks. Scalability knowledge lets you design systems that grow with load gracefully.

Vertical vs. horizontal scalingStateless services and load balancingSharding and partitioningRead replicas and fan-outBackpressure and rate limiting

Databases & Storage

Understand the tradeoffs across relational, NoSQL, and storage models to pick the right data layer. Data modeling choices are the hardest to reverse later.

SQL vs. NoSQL data modelsIndexing and query performanceNormalization vs. denormalizationReplication and partitioning strategiesOLTP vs. OLAP workloads

Caching

Learn where and how to cache to cut latency and load while keeping data fresh. Effective caching is one of the highest-leverage performance tools.

Cache strategies: cache-aside, write-throughEviction policies (LRU, LFU, TTL)Cache invalidation and stalenessCDN and edge cachingThundering herd and cache stampede

Messaging & Queues

Master asynchronous messaging to decouple services and absorb load spikes. Queues and streams are key to resilient, event-driven architectures.

Message queues vs. pub/sub vs. streamsAt-least-once vs. exactly-once deliveryIdempotent consumers and dedupDead-letter queues and retriesOrdering and partitioning guarantees

Consistency & Availability

Understand CAP, consistency models, and replication tradeoffs to reason about correctness under failure. This is central to distributed systems design.

CAP and PACELC theoremsStrong vs. eventual consistencyQuorums and replicationDistributed consensus (Raft, Paxos basics)Failover, partitions, and split-brain

API Design

Learn to design clear, versioned, and resilient APIs that clients can depend on. Good API design reduces integration pain and breaking changes.

REST resource modeling and status codesVersioning and backward compatibilityPagination, filtering, and idempotency keysRate limiting and authenticationREST vs. gRPC vs. GraphQL tradeoffs

Ready to benchmark your System Design skills?

35 questions · about 5 minutes · see your level and percentile instantly.

Take the assessment →

Explore other assessments

🤖AI Engineering 🧑‍💻AI for Coding 🧠Building AI on the Cloud ☸️Kubernetes ☁️AWS Cloud 🎨Frontend Engineering ⚙️Backend Engineering 🗄️Databases 📦Containerization 🔐Security & DevSecOps 🏗️Terraform & IaC 📊Observability & Monitoring 🐍Python 🚀CI/CD & Delivery Pipelines 🔁GitOps & Delivery 🐧Linux & the Command Line 🔷Microsoft Azure 🌥️Google Cloud 📜Shell Scripting