Verkada·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture
Jul 2026
Verkada system design round with two back-to-back problems, both pretty meaty. The door access one felt manageable but the heartbeat monitoring problem at 10 million devices scale pushed me to think harder about write throughput than I expected.
- Design a door access control system that supports looking up which doors a person can open, which people can open a given door, and granting access as an admin. Cover data modeling, API design, indexing, authorization, auditability, and future operations like revoking access.
- Design a heartbeat monitoring system for 10 million devices where each device sends a signal every minute. Build a dashboard showing device health and online/offline status. Discuss write throughput, ingestion architecture, storage for recent vs historical data, how you determine online/offline, dashboard APIs, and how the system handles failures at scale.
“The bidirectional lookup requirement is what tripped me up first.”