8-Week System Design Interview Prep Roadmap
This roadmap is built for engineers who have 6–12 months of work experience and want to break into top-tier companies. Eight weeks of structured practice — roughly 10–15 hours per week — is enough to go from "I know the basics" to "I can handle any question they throw at me." Every item links directly to an interactive simulator on this site so you can watch the concepts run instead of just reading about them.
Week 1–2: Foundations & Building Blocks
Goal: Answer any "how does X scale?" follow-up with concrete numbers and components.
Week 3–4: Core HLD Interview Designs
Goal: Walk through any of these 8 designs end-to-end in 35 minutes — requirements, API, data model, scale, trade-offs.
Week 5: Advanced HLD Designs
Goal: Handle the harder volume-2 designs that separate senior candidates from mid-level ones.
Week 6: System Internals Deep Dive
Goal: Answer "walk me through a write under read-committed" or "what happens when a Raft leader is partitioned" without hesitation.
Week 7: DSA Patterns for Coding Rounds
Goal: Recognize the pattern in 30 seconds and code a clean solution in under 20 minutes.
Week 8: Mock Interviews & Weak-Spot Review
Goal: Run 3 full mock design sessions under time pressure. Identify and plug remaining gaps.
- Re-run your 3 weakest HLD designs6h
- Re-visit internals you found hard3h
- LeetCode medium problems, timed4h
- Behavioral: write STAR stories for 10 scenarios3h
- Mock interview with a peer3h
- Read failure modes for top 5 HLD designs2h
Recommended books alongside this roadmap
- Alex Xu — System Design Interview Vol. 1 & 2: The HLD walkthroughs on this site are grounded in these books. Read a chapter, then run the matching simulator.
- Martin Kleppmann — Designing Data-Intensive Applications (DDIA): The bible for week 6 internals. Dense but worth every page.
- Alex Petrov — Database Internals: For B-trees, LSM, WAL, and consensus — the week-6 deep dive lives here.
- Neetcode 150 / Blind 75: Structured LeetCode list for week 7 DSA. Every pattern links from the DSA simulators.
Frequently asked questions
I only have 4 weeks — what do I cut?
Keep weeks 1–2 (foundations), week 3 (first 5 core designs), and half of week 7 (two pointers, binary search, DP). Skip week 5 advanced HLD unless you're interviewing at a company known for those problems.
Do I need to code anything during system design rounds?
Rarely, but interviewers will ask you to write pseudo-code or a key function. Week 6 internals give you this: knowing what a B-tree split looks like in code builds far more credibility than saying "the database handles it."
Is 8 weeks realistic if I'm working full-time?
Yes at 10–15 hours per week (~1.5–2 hours weekdays plus 4–6 hours on weekends). The interactive simulators compress learning time significantly — watching Raft elect a leader in real time beats reading 6 pages of text.
What companies is this targeted at?
The roadmap covers the question style asked at Google, Meta, Amazon, Netflix, Apple, Uber, Stripe, Airbnb, LinkedIn, and Microsoft. The week-5 advanced designs (payment system, stock exchange) are specifically valuable for fintech and senior+ roles.
Ready to start? Open the interactive simulator
All 106 simulators are free, browser-based, and require no sign-up. Start week 1 right now.
Open System Design Simulator →→ See the Top 50 System Design Interview Questions · Browse all 27 HLD Walkthroughs · Home