Pietecx
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System Design Mastery

Master scalability, trade-offs, and architecture interviews with live whiteboard practice and senior engineer mentorship.
Advanced
Mid to Senior
6 weeks

Overview

Designed for developers targeting senior and staff roles, this course covers distributed systems, caching, messaging, data partitioning, and real-world architecture case studies used in top tech interviews.
Each week pairs concept depth with timed whiteboard practice. You learn to clarify requirements, sketch an end-to-end path, deepen hotspots, and defend trade-offs under pressure—exactly how senior loops evaluate you.

Learning pathway

Follow the phases below from setup to outcomes. Each phase maps into the weekly plan.
1
Requirements & constraints
Define goals, scale, latency, and reliability before drawing boxes.
2
High-level architecture
Map clients, APIs, services, storage, and caches end to end.
3
Deep design & trade-offs
Work partitioning, consistency, messaging, and failure modes.
4
Architecture reviews
Whiteboard with Pietecx engineers using structured frameworks.
5
Interview readiness
Tighten communication, estimation, and senior-loop presentation.
1
Phase 1: Requirements & constraints
Define goals, scale, latency, and reliability before drawing boxes.
2
Phase 2: High-level architecture
Map clients, APIs, services, storage, and caches end to end.
3
Phase 3: Deep design & trade-offs
Work partitioning, consistency, messaging, and failure modes.
4
Phase 4: Architecture reviews
Whiteboard with Pietecx engineers using structured frameworks.
5
Phase 5: Interview readiness
Tighten communication, estimation, and senior-loop presentation.

Week-by-week plan

See what you cover, what you do, and what you ship each week—so progress stays concrete.
Week 1

Clarify before you design

Build the habit of removing ambiguity before architecture work begins.
What you cover
  • Functional vs non-functional requirements
  • SLAs and SLOs
  • Workload shapes
  • Assumption logging
What you do
  • Requirements drill on two classic prompts
  • Write assumption checklists
  • First mentor feedback on clarification quality
Week deliverable: Requirements one-pager template you reuse all course
Week 2

End-to-end architecture path

Sketch simple systems that work for one user before scaling complexity.
What you cover
  • Client/API/service/storage path
  • Read vs write paths
  • Basic capacity math
  • Single-region baseline
What you do
  • Design URL shortener and feed-style systems
  • Timed 20-minute high-level sketches
  • Peer critique of diagram clarity
Week deliverable: Two annotated high-level architecture diagrams
Week 3

Scale, cache, and partition

Introduce scale levers only where bottlenecks justify them.
What you cover
  • Caching strategies
  • Sharding and partitioning
  • Hot keys
  • CDN and edge concerns
What you do
  • Add scale layers to week-2 designs
  • Estimate QPS and storage growth
  • Defend why each cache exists
Week deliverable: Scaled design with capacity notes
Week 4

Consistency, queues, and failure

Show senior judgement on async flows and degraded modes.
What you cover
  • Consistency models
  • Idempotency
  • Queues and backpressure
  • Retry and dead-letter patterns
What you do
  • Redesign a sync system with async stages
  • Failure-mode walkthrough
  • Observability checklist for on-call
Week deliverable: Failure and consistency trade-off memo
Week 5

Case studies under pressure

Combine communication and depth on chat, payments, and feed-style systems.
What you cover
  • Chat/presence systems
  • Payments invariants
  • News feed fan-out
  • Multi-tenant concerns
What you do
  • Full 45-minute mock design
  • Structured scorecard review
  • Rewrite weak sections of your narrative
Week deliverable: Recorded mock + personal improvement plan
Week 6

Senior-loop readiness

Polish delivery for hiring panels: clarity, trade-offs, and composure.
What you cover
  • Estimation fluency
  • Constraint changes mid-interview
  • Staff-level communication
  • Known gaps framing
What you do
  • Final mock panel with Pietecx engineers
  • Constraint-change drills
  • Offer-level positioning discussion
Week deliverable: Pass/ready assessment and next practice plan

What you will learn

  • URL shorteners, feeds, chat, and payment system drills
  • Latency, availability, and consistency trade-off frameworks
  • Capacity planning and back-of-the-envelope estimation
  • Weekly mock architecture reviews with Pietecx engineers
  • Structured answer templates for onsite loops
  • Senior-level feedback on communication and depth

Enroll in System Design Mastery

Send a message to our engineering team to request enrollment, remote corporate cohort delivery, or premium upgrade options.
Duration: 6 weeks · 6 weekly milestones with Pietecx feedback.
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