Graphite·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture
Jun 2026
System design round at Graphite for a software engineer role. The prompt was about building an i18n layer for a large-scale site, which sounds scoped but gets complicated fast once you start thinking about latency and developer ergonomics together.
- Design an internationalization (i18n) system for a large website (think Airbnb scale, ~10M monthly active users, ~200 engineers) that's currently English-only and needs to support multiple languages. The system should minimize latency and require as little change as possible from engineers, ideally something like T("Hello") at the call site.
“The T() wrapper constraint was the interesting part.”