Lowe's·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture
Jul 2026
System design round at Lowe's for a software engineering role. The whole session was basically one giant cloud architecture question broken into layers, and they just kept pulling the thread until you ran out of things to say.
- Walk through how you'd design, deploy, and operate a cloud-based web application that needs to scale horizontally and stay fault-tolerant for millions of users.
- How do you decide between IaaS, PaaS, and serverless for a given workload?
- Which compute option would you pick for this system, VMs, containers, or functions, and why?
- How would you design load balancing and autoscaling for a stateless service at this scale?
- How do you choose between relational, NoSQL, object storage, and in-memory cache for different parts of the system, and how do you think about consistency and durability tradeoffs?
- Describe your approach to network design including VPC layout, security groups, NAT, CDN, and zero-trust principles.
- How would you handle IAM, secrets management, encryption in transit and at rest, and key rotation for this system?
- How do you design for high availability and disaster recovery, specifically around multi-AZ or multi-region setups and defining RTO and RPO targets?
- How would you implement observability for this system, and how do you set SLOs and manage cost governance?
- Walk me through your CI/CD pipeline design, how you'd use infrastructure as code, and how you'd handle blue/green or canary releases with rollback.
“This was the whole interview, basically.”