Axon·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture
Jul 2026
System design round at Axon for a software engineer role. The whole thing was basically one big question about building an analytics warehouse for an e-commerce platform, and they wanted you to cover everything from schema design to pipeline architecture to SCD handling. Dense.
- Design an analytics data warehouse for an e-commerce platform that supports services like item search, item detail views, login, cart operations, checkout, and order viewing. The design should support specific pre-authored queries such as counting unique users in Asia who viewed a given item within the current calendar month, and finding the three orders with the highest total amount in real time.
- How would you model the event schema for user interactions, and what fields, data types, and key relationships would you define?
- Walk through your approach to session modeling and how you'd generate and manage tracking or session IDs across anonymous and authenticated user states.
- How would you handle deduplication and idempotency for incoming events, and what's your strategy for late-arriving or out-of-order events?
- Describe your partitioning and indexing strategy for the warehouse tables to support the kinds of queries the platform needs.
- How would you model slowly changing dimensions for users, items, and geography, and what dimensional modeling approach would you use overall?
- What ingestion and processing pipeline would you design, and how would you weigh batch versus streaming approaches given scaling and cost constraints?
“This question is massive.”