Taco Bell·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture
Apr 2026
Onsite system design round in SF for a software engineering role. The main question was a fun but deceptively hard high-traffic voting system, followed by some pretty deep infrastructure dives that I wasn't fully ready for.
- Design a voting system for a Superbowl taco flavor selection campaign. The system needs to handle millions of QPS in short bursts, let users tap to vote quickly, and show a real-time results leaderboard.
- Walk through the internals of Kafka. How does it actually work under the hood?
- Explain the internals of a time-series database. How does it store and query data efficiently?
- How would you set up an EKS deployment strategy and configure auto-scaling for a high-traffic service?
“The burst traffic angle is what makes this interesting.”