FoundationsAdvanced Interview Playbook
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Multi-region read path with a sticky write region

Design a global SaaS API: users are worldwide, reads must be fast everywhere, but all durable writes currently go to one primary region (us-east). Show the request path for a logged-in read of a user profile that was updated 2 seconds ago in another region.

  • ~20k RPS global reads
  • Single primary for writes (for now)
  • Profile payload ~5KB JSON
  • Stale reads up to a few seconds are usually OK — except right after the user saves

Hint: Separate anonymous/cacheable from authenticated; call out session affinity or version tokens for read-your-writes.

Dojo II rules of engagement

Same loop as Dojo I — but interviewers will punish hand-waving on consistency, money, and races.

  1. Name the consistency requirement in one sentence before drawing boxes.
  2. Mark every arrow sync vs async.
  3. Own one ugly failure (partial outage, duplicate event, clock skew).
  4. Say what you would ship in v1 vs v2 under time pressure.

Sketch the multi-region read path — including what happens right after a write.

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