8 weeks · live design reviews · 2 mock interviews
System Design Cohort
A live, mentor-led cohort for system design interviews and real architecture work. Learn the building blocks, design ten systems end to end, and get your answers reviewed and mock-interviewed.
System design interview-க்கும் real architecture வேலைக்கும் — estimation-ல இருந்து ten case studies வரைக்கும் live-ஆ, mentor review-உடன், mock interview-உடன் கத்துக்கலாம். ஒரு session-ஐ இலவசமா try பண்ணலாம்.
About this program
The free System Design course teaches the concepts one at a time. This cohort is the next step: you design under a clock, in front of a mentor, every week. You learn a repeatable structure for the answer, practise estimating and trade-offs, build ten designs from a blank page, and finish with two mock interviews and written feedback. One session of it is free to try on this page.
Who it is for
- Developers with 1 to 8 years of experience preparing for system design rounds
- Backend engineers who want to design systems, not only build features
- Engineers who know the terms (cache, queue, shard) but freeze when asked to put them together
What you will be able to do
- Estimate load, storage and bandwidth in two minutes and turn the numbers into decisions
- Choose databases, caches, queues and consistency models and defend the trade-off
- Walk an interviewer through a design in a clear, timed structure
- Design a URL shortener, rate limiter, news feed, chat, payments flow and video platform
- Spot single points of failure and plan for failure, scale and cost
Session 1 · Estimate before you design
One full session from this program, open to everyone. Read it, run the code, and see how the live sessions will feel. Everything else in the syllabus below unlocks when you join the batch.
Try this session free →Syllabus
Locked until you join the batch. The syllabus is open so you can see exactly what you are buying.
Weeks 1-2 · Think like a designer
🔒 The interview framework and estimation6 topics
Clarify, count, sketch, go deep. Start every answer the same way.
Framework
- The seven steps of a design answer and how to time them
- Functional vs non-functional requirements; what to ask first
- Thinking out loud: how interviewers score you
Estimation
- Requests per second, storage, bandwidth and cache size
- Turning every number into a design decision
- Peak vs average, read vs write ratios
🔒 Networking, APIs and load balancing5 topics
The pipes between the boxes.
Networking
- DNS, TCP, TLS, HTTP/2 and what a request really costs
- Latency numbers every engineer should know
APIs
- REST, gRPC and GraphQL: when each fits
- Pagination, idempotency keys, rate limits, versioning
Load balancing
- L4 vs L7, algorithms, health checks, sticky sessions
Weeks 3-4 · Data
🔒 Databases and storage6 topics
Pick the store from the access pattern, not from fashion.
Choosing a store
- SQL vs NoSQL: relational, key-value, document, wide-column, graph
- ACID, isolation levels and what they cost
- Indexes, B-trees and LSM trees
Scaling data
- Replication: leader-follower, multi-leader, leaderless
- Sharding: keys, hot shards, resharding
- Object storage and blob design
🔒 Caching and CDNs6 topics
Make the common case cheap.
Caching
- Cache-aside, write-through, write-back
- Eviction, TTLs and stampedes
- Cache invalidation without lying to users
- Distributed caches and consistent hashing
Edge
- CDNs, push vs pull, cache keys
- What to cache at the edge and what never to
Weeks 5-6 · Scale and survive
🔒 Queues, streams and async work5 topics
Absorb spikes, decouple services.
Messaging
- Queues vs logs vs pub/sub
- Delivery guarantees: at-most, at-least, exactly-once (and why it is hard)
- Ordering, partitions and consumer groups
Patterns
- Outbox, saga, retries with backoff, dead-letter queues
- Batch vs stream processing
🔒 Consistency, consensus and reliability7 topics
What breaks, and what you promise when it does.
Distributed systems
- CAP and PACELC without the myths
- Consensus: Raft in plain words, leader election
- Distributed locks and their traps
- Clocks, ordering and idempotency
Reliability
- Single points of failure, failover, health checks
- Rate limiting, circuit breakers, bulkheads
- Backups, disaster recovery, SLOs and error budgets
Weeks 7-8 · Case studies and mocks
🔒 Case studies, walked end to end7 topics
Each design is built live, then you redo it alone.
Designs
- URL shortener and a distributed rate limiter
- News feed and notification service
- Chat and presence
- Payments flow (UPI-style) with idempotency and reconciliation
- Video streaming and a CDN
- Search autocomplete
For each
- Requirements, estimates, API, data model, high-level design, deep dive, failures, trade-offs
🔒 Mock interviews and feedback4 topics
Practise the real thing and get written feedback.
- Two timed mock system design interviews with a mentor
- Written feedback against a fixed rubric: structure, depth, trade-offs, communication
- A review of your weekly assignments
- A personal checklist to carry into real interviews
Projects
- A weekly design assignment, reviewed by a mentor
- Ten case-study designs drawn and defended
- Two mock system design interviews with a written rubric
- A personal design checklist
What our students say
In their own words, from students of our live Parottasalna batches.
Concepts are explained in the simplest way to understand. Doubts are clearly explained on the spot until everyone understands the concept — very useful for preparing for interviews.
If you want to change your role with the current trend, he is the best — and you can learn in your mother tongue. I can now change my role and attend interviews confidently.
The way you teach things from absolute scratch and not from an abstraction level really made me understand a lot of technical topics with much more depth. “I am able to explain why and how things work and know how to do it” — that would be the takeaway from the sessions.
The hands-on examples and doubt-clearing sessions helped me understand how to apply these concepts in my own projects.
Clear explanation with simple examples and a practical approach to real-time issues. You can learn the basics very clearly and gain the confidence to be a developer.
I now have the confidence to crack system design interviews.