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AdvancedArchitecture & Design

System Design Roadmap

Master designing scalable distributed systems

Duration
6-8 months
Job Demand
very high
Phases
6
Views
1051

About This Roadmap

System Design is a critical skill for senior software engineers, focusing on designing large-scale distributed systems that handle millions of users. This skill is essential for technical interviews at top tech companies and for architecting real-world systems. As you master system design, you will learn to design systems like URL shorteners, social media platforms, video streaming services, ride-sharing apps, and more. This comprehensive roadmap covers scalability principles, load balancing, caching strategies, database sharding, CAP theorem, microservices architecture, message queues, CDNs, and real-world system design case studies. System design knowledge is crucial for senior engineers, tech leads, and architects. The skill requires understanding of distributed systems, databases, networking, and the ability to make tradeoffs between consistency, availability, and partition tolerance.

Prerequisites

  • Software development experience
  • Understanding of databases
  • Networking basics
  • Data structures knowledge

What You'll Learn

Design scalable systems
Understand tradeoffs
Master load balancing
Implement caching
Design databases
Handle high traffic
Ace system design interviews

Complete Learning Path

6-8 weeks

1
Scalability

Horizontal vs vertical scaling, load balancing

2
Availability

Redundancy, failover, disaster recovery

3
Performance

Latency, throughput, bottlenecks

4
Consistency

Strong, eventual, CAP theorem

8-10 weeks

1
Load Balancers

Round robin, least connections, consistent hashing

2
Caching

Redis, Memcached, cache strategies, CDN

3
Databases

SQL vs NoSQL, sharding, replication, indexing

4
Message Queues

Kafka, RabbitMQ, pub-sub, event streaming

8-10 weeks

1
Distributed Systems

Consensus, Paxos, Raft, distributed transactions

2
Microservices

Service decomposition, API gateway, service mesh

3
Data Partitioning

Sharding strategies, consistent hashing

4
Rate Limiting

Token bucket, leaky bucket, sliding window

10-12 weeks

1
URL Shortener

Design bit.ly, hashing, database schema

2
Social Media

Design Twitter, news feed, followers

3
Video Streaming

Design Netflix, CDN, encoding, storage

4
Ride Sharing

Design Uber, geolocation, matching, routing

8-10 weeks

1
E-commerce

Design Amazon, inventory, payments, recommendations

2
Messaging

Design WhatsApp, real-time messaging, encryption

3
Search Engine

Design Google, crawling, indexing, ranking

4
File Storage

Design Dropbox, file sync, deduplication

6-8 weeks

1
Interview Framework

Requirements, estimation, design, deep dive

2
Communication

Thinking aloud, asking questions, tradeoffs

3
Practice Problems

LeetCode system design, mock interviews

4
Common Mistakes

Avoiding pitfalls, time management

Tools & Technologies

Load BalancersRedisKafkaPostgreSQLMongoDBCassandraElasticsearchCDNKubernetesMicroservices

Career Opportunities

  • Senior Software Engineer
  • Staff Engineer
  • Principal Engineer
  • Software Architect
  • Tech Lead
  • Engineering Manager

Expected Salary (India)

₹15-25 LPA (Senior)
₹25-45 LPA (Staff)
₹45-80 LPA (Principal)
₹80L+ (Architect)

Companies Hiring

GoogleAmazonMicrosoftMetaNetflixUberAirbnbAll FAANG and top tech companies

Ready to Start?

Follow this roadmap step-by-step and track your progress.

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