Ace your system design interview
The fastest way to get there is reps: curated problems on a real whiteboard, a mock interviewer probing as you draw, and a graded debrief that turns every gap into a study plan.
Design a news feedAttempt 2Senior barThe best prep is reps
The reading gave you the concepts. The interview asks you to perform them: design out loud, defend your tradeoffs, pace 45 minutes. Those are skills, and skills grow fastest when you practice and get critiqued.
A solid start. Reading builds recognition: you know the patterns when you see them. Reps are what make them yours.
Your moment. A blank board, a running clock, an interviewer listening. Put in the reps here and it starts to feel like home turf.
What a rep looks like
Pick a problem, design it on the clock with an interviewer pushing back, get graded, and leave with a plan for closing your gaps. Everything below is the real product.
Prepare efficiently by choosing from a carefully curated question bank
Our team curates the bank around the questions that actually come up in real loops, so every rep is representative of an interview you could sit. Or paste in the one you were asked last week.
Every question is graded against a rubric generated for the level you are targeting, so the bar moves with you.
Your write path is clear. I don’t see a number anywhere. How much storage does a year of posts take?
~1.2KB × 400M/day × 365 ≈ 175TB before replication.
Design it live, on the clock, with an AI-powered mock interviewer
A real whiteboard, seeded with a delivery framework, and the same 45 minutes you'll get on the day, counting down while you draw.
The mock interviewer reads your board as you work and pushes where the detail is thin: a number you skipped, a component with no failure story. Practicing that conversation is the point.
Get graded and see how to do better
Systematic grades your session the way a real interviewer would: a hire call at your target level, the level you actually performed at, and a score on every rubric axis, each point tied to a justification.
Pacing included: the report shows where your 45 minutes actually went and what would have scored higher on each axis, so you leave with fixes, not a feeling. Then ask the grader why.
Clear structure and real numbers. Failure-mode depth is what separates this from Staff+.
Sixteen minutes on requirements left eight for the deep dive. Be drawing by minute ten.
Readings on the concepts this session exposed, and bank questions that exercise them.
Generate study planWhy regional failover breaks a naive fan-out, and how much lag you can actually tolerate.
A replica thirty seconds behind the primary is not a copy: it is a different database that happens to share a name. The moment you fail over to it, that gap becomes user-visible, and timelines drop posts they have already served.
Where it bites in an interviewState the replication mode before you are asked. If reads go to replicas, name the staleness the product tolerates, and what the write path does while a region is dark.
Picked because depth and tradeoffs was your weakest axis.
Close the gaps with a study plan
One click on any graded session builds a concrete, structured plan around your blind spots: readings written to close each gap, and bank questions that exercise them, in an order that builds.
Check off readings, run the problems, and the plan tracks your sessions on its own, so the next rep starts where this one left off.
Cheaper than a single live mock
No scheduling hassles: practice at your convenience and get a full graded session whenever you have 45 minutes.
Frequently asked questions
Why not just ask an assistant like ChatGPT or Claude to mock interview me?
You can, but you end up assembling the interview yourself: a drawing tool in one tab, a question you thought up, and a chatbot that grades against whatever bar it invented that day. Systematic puts the whiteboard, the question bank, the clock and the grading in one place, on rubrics our team wrote around what system design interviewers actually score you on.
How does using Systematic compare to live mock interview services?
A live mock costs hundreds of dollars and has to be scheduled around someone else's calendar, so most people do one or two. Systematic is available whenever you have 45 minutes, for a fraction of that, and still does the part that makes a mock worth it: it reads your board as you work, asks follow-ups where the detail is thin, and points out design flaws you would otherwise take into the real thing.
Is the rubric fixed, or does the model invent one each time?
The five axes are fixed in code. What gets generated is the band descriptors for a given question and level, so "Solid" on a rate limiter means something concrete and different from "Solid" on a payment ledger. Every point in the report is attached to an axis and a justification.
What levels of engineers is Systematic suitable for?
All levels ranging from interns to Staff+ engineers can get value from using Systematic. Each level has its own expectations and rubrics for the same question. Systematic's grading report provides a hire/no-hire recommendation and the level you actually performed at, next to the one you aimed for.
Walk into your systems design interview with confidence.
Start preparing efficiently today.
Start a free mock interview