serve robotics·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture
Jun 2026
System design round at Serve Robotics for a software engineering role. The whole thing revolved around one big ambiguous prompt and how you break it down. Felt more like a product-meets-infrastructure exercise than a pure coding interview.
- A team asks you to build a 'robot heat map.' How do you figure out what they actually need, and what do you build?
- For each use case you identified, what metrics would you emit and what tags or dimensions would you attach to each data point?
- What storage solution would you choose for geospatial data at this scale, and what are the trade-offs between options like Redis, Cassandra, PostGIS, and Elasticsearch?
“The prompt is intentionally vague and I think that's the whole point.”