System Design Course: Senior Level Interview Preparation

By Mukul Raina

Created by Mukul Raina (Senior Software Engineer & Tech Lead at Microsoft, Oxford MSc), this course goes beyond fundamentals to prepare you for Staff-level and senior FAANG interviews with production-grade depth. It covers observability (logs, metrics, traces, RED/USE methods, SLIs/SLOs, distributed tracing with OpenTelemetry), safe deployment strategies (Blue-Green, Canary with Istio, Shadow deployments, automated rollbacks, feature flags), security (JWT/refresh tokens, RBAC vs ABAC, HashiCorp Vault, Zero Trust, mTLS, encryption, GDPR/PII handling), cost-aware design (right-sizing, spot instances, reserved capacity, storage lifecycle policies, caching ROI), global-scale multi-region architectures (active-active, CRDTs, anycast, data sovereignty), and incident management (blameless postmortems, circuit breakers, on-call best practices). It also includes real-world case studies (social feed, payment processing, real-time chat) and an interview playbook to help you signal production-depth thinking and avoid common red flags.