Pass the design round.
Land the offer.
A complete interview prep system for engineers targeting L4–L7 at FAANG-tier companies. 52 named questions, fully drilled. The Senior+ Playbook. A structured 6-week cohort. Everything you need, nothing you don't.
Four products. One system.
Start free. Upgrade when you're 90 days from a real loop. The products compound — each one is designed to make the next one more valuable.
Free Newsletter
Weekly concept primers, system design commentary, and career frameworks. The top of the funnel — shareable, authoritative, and free forever.
Paid Subscription
Every Tuesday: a full named-question walkthrough + matching drill card. Discord community. Level-calibrated — every answer shows L4, L5, and L6 versions.
Question Vault
52 full walkthroughs. 52 drill cards. 6 framework cheatsheets. The Senior+ Playbook. All 10 archetypes covered. One payment. Lifetime access.
6-Week Async Cohort
A fully structured, self-paced course. Six weekly modules unlock via email. Written assignment feedback within 72 hours. Peer review pairing. Discord cohort channel. 25 seats per cohort. No live sessions — designed for engineers with full-time jobs.
Every Tuesday. One question.
Fully drilled.
Not a curated link list. Not a summary of a YouTube video. A complete, named-question walkthrough — the exact answer that would earn a Hire signal at your target level — plus a one-page drill card for the morning of your interview.
- ✓Weekly question walkthroughs — 2,000–4,000 words. API design, data model, architecture, deep dive, follow-up probes, Senior vs Staff comparison.
- ✓Matching drill card (PDF) — one page. Every senior signal, every loop-failing mistake, every time-box. Re-read it in 4 minutes the morning of your interview.
- ✓Discord community — paid subscribers only. #mock-interview-partners, #offers-landed, #ask-the-author (answered within 48h).
- ✓Level-calibrated answers — every walkthrough shows what L4, L5, and L6 answers look like to the same question. Know your bar. Answer for it.
- ✓Full archive access — every walkthrough ever published, searchable by archetype, company, and level.
- ✓India / SEA pricing — ₹399/mo or ₹2,999/yr. Same content. Different checkout link.
Paid Subscription
Cancel anytime. No lock-in.
or save 17% with annual — $99/yr
- ✓ Weekly walkthrough (every Tuesday)
- ✓ Matching drill card PDF
- ✓ Discord paid-subscriber community
- ✓ Full back-archive access
- ✓ $50 off the Question Vault
- ✓ $300 off the Cohort
₹399/mo · ₹2,999/yr
Email sdr@systemdrd.com with subject "INR sub" to get the local checkout link.
52 questions.
Pay once. Use forever.
The complete walkthrough library. Every named question that gets asked at Amazon, Google, Meta, Stripe, Uber, Netflix, and their tier — each one drilled the way an L5 or L6 engineer would answer it in the room.
Paid subscribers: $249 (save $50)
India/SEA: ₹9,999 · email for link
| # | Question | Archetype | Level | Probe |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Design a URL Shortener Asked at: Twitter, TinyURL, Bitly | Infrastructure | L4–L6 | Distributed ID generation at scale |
| 02 | Design Stripe Payments Asked at: Stripe, PayPal, Robinhood | Money Movement | L5–L7 | Idempotency keys · double-entry ledger |
| 03 | Design Twitter Timeline Asked at: Twitter, Meta, LinkedIn | Social Feed | L4–L7 | Fanout-on-write vs fanout-on-read |
| 04 | Design Uber Dispatch Asked at: Uber, Lyft, DoorDash | Marketplace | L4–L7 | Geohashing vs quadtree · S2 geometry |
| 05 | Design WhatsApp Asked at: Meta, Apple, Slack | Messaging | L4–L7 | Delivery semantics · FLP impossibility |
| 06 | Design Netflix Streaming Asked at: Netflix, YouTube, Spotify | Streaming | L4–L7 | Adaptive bitrate · CDN cold-start |
| 07 | Design Google Drive / Dropbox Asked at: Google, Dropbox, Apple | File Sync | L4–L7 | Delta sync · conflict resolution |
| 08 | Design a Rate Limiter Asked at: Cloudflare, Stripe, AWS | Counters | L4–L7 | Sliding window counter · Lua atomicity |
| 09 | Design Typeahead / Autocomplete Asked at: Google, Amazon, Twitter | Search | L4–L7 | Trie with pre-computed top-K |
| 10 | Design a Distributed Cache Asked at: everywhere | Infrastructure | L4–L7 | Consistent hashing · thundering herd |
Also included: The Senior+ Playbook
A 30-page guide for engineers who've done the prep and still aren't landing offers. How interviewers actually score the design round. Scoping discipline. Reading the interviewer. The time management checkpoints. What changes at L4, L5, L6, and L7. The move that turns a Hire into a Strong Hire.
Paid subscribers: $249
The structured prep
system. With feedback.
A fully async, self-paced 6-week course delivered through a private Notion portal and weekly email unlocks. No live sessions. No scheduled calls. No timezone conflicts. Written feedback on every assignment within 72 hours.
Foundations — The 6-Step Framework
Run the framework cold on a benchmark question. Pre-diagnostic assignment sets your personal gap.
Estimation & Data Modeling
Numbers that earn architecture. Access patterns drive schema — not the reverse.
Scaling & Bottleneck Analysis
Find the bottleneck before the interviewer names it. The 100x follow-up, drilled.
Communication & Trade-offs
The three-sentence pattern. SLO naming. The phrases that separate senior from junior answers.
Level-Targeting (L4 / L5 / L6)
Same question. Answer it twice. Name specifically what changes between the two versions.
Capstone — Full Timed Design
50 minutes. Unsealed question. No notes. Graded against the full rubric with detailed written feedback.
6-Week Async Cohort
quarterly · ₹49,999
Paid subscribers: $999
- Private Notion course portal
- Weekly module unlock emails
- Written feedback in 72h
- Peer review pairings
- Private Discord cohort channel
- Question Vault included ($299 value)
- Alumni Discord access post-cohort
- 50% off next cohort for alumni
Applications reviewed within 48h · no one gets ghosted
Payment plans available (3 installments).
Email sdr@systemdrd.com to arrange.
Start here. No credit card.
Three downloads available free with your newsletter subscription. No upsell attached to these — they're useful on their own.
FAANG Question Bank
100 named system design questions across 10 archetypes, level-tagged L4–L7. The full list of what actually gets asked and where.
Download PDF →6-Step Framework Cheatsheet
The interview framework in one page. Time-boxed, mapped to what interviewers score. Re-read it the morning of every loop.
Download PDF →Free Newsletter Archive
Every free post ever published — concept primers, commentary, career frameworks. Searchable by topic. No paywall on the archive index.
Browse archive →How it compares
| Alternative | Cost | What it lacks |
|---|---|---|
| Mock interview (interviewing.io) | $225–300 | Per session. No structured curriculum. No drill-card library. One session = one question. |
| Educative / Grokking SDI | $79/yr | No Senior vs Staff differentiation. No drill cards. Surface-level on most questions. No community. |
| Exponent membership | $12–24/mo | Video-based. Doesn't go deep on interview probes. No level-calibrated answers. No drill cards. |
| System Design Primer (free) | $0 | No named questions. No interview-calibrated answers. No drill cards. No feedback. Great foundations resource, not a prep system. |
Verify current competitor pricing before publishing. Prices change.
Common questions
The offer worth less than 2% of the comp difference.
The gap between "we'll revisit in a year" and a Senior offer at a FAANG-tier company is not more YouTube videos. It's drilling the right questions at the right depth with feedback.
7-day refund on the Vault · 25 cohort seats per quarter · India/SEA pricing available