Amazon System Design Interview: Design Parking Garage

Watch our mock Amazon system design interview. Neamah asks Timothy, Amazon/Airbnb software engineer, a question on how to design a reservation and payment system for a parking garage.

Chapters -
00:00:00 Introduction
00:00:37 Question
00:00:53 Clarifying questions
00:02:55 Answer
00:03:11 APIs
00:09:34 Scale
00:10:55 Data types
00:19:56 Design
00:23:27 Trade-offs
00:26:15 Interview analysis
00:28:33 Tips

Watch more videos here:

ABOUT US:
Did you enjoy this video? Want to land your dream career? Exponent is an online community, course, and coaching platform to help you ace your upcoming interview. Exponent has helped people land their dream careers at companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and high-growth startups. Exponent is currently licensed by Stanford, Yale, UW, and others.

Our courses include interview lessons, questions, and complete answers with video walkthroughs. Access hours of real interview videos, where we analyze what went right or wrong, and our 1000+ community of expert coaches and industry professionals, to help you get your dream job and more!

#systemdesign #amazon #airbnb #swe #tech #entrepreneurship #parking #exponent #tpm

[okeyD]

She is really simulating the real job interview, checking the phone in middle and acting like she is listening and responding with 'yes, yea' 😂 😀

[cco]

I interviewed at Amazon some time ago, and this was the first design interview question I had ever gotten, so I had no idea what to do with it. Moreover, the interviewer didn't say "a reservation and payment system for a parking garage", he just say "a parking garage". So I started drawing the levels of the parking garage and making decisions like using angled parking spots because I like angled parking spots.

[praveensg]

Neamah needs to talk more (or even interrupt) and ask challenging questions. He seemed like he came in with the solution in mind and went through it godspeed.

[YorozuyaNeesan]

This was so helpful. I basically have my first system design experience in an interview tomorrow for an internship. I feel like that's the point where I will fail, but this is at least helping me see what kind of thought process I need to get in to. So regardless of how I do, THANK YOU for this. EDIT: I got an offer for the job and I am certain watching and learning from this video the night before really, really helped, so THANK YOU, AGAIN!!!

[Keilnoth]

You know they interview for big tech companies when budget is never mentioned in the conversation, especially as they start adding sharding and replicas right away. 😅 I'd definitely ask questions like how many users do you expect? How many garages? How many locations? Is it local, national or international? And adding a load balancer in front of the backend seems quite reasonable too so you avoid scaling it vertically.

[DoJoStan]

Wow this was excellent in how it went through it systematically

1. General Requirements
2. Endpoints (External/Internal)
3. Data entities
4. High level architecture

but still kept it conversational. This was super helpful!

[exclusive]

I had an unreasonable amount of ads while watching this very reasonable interview

[BenjaminChevoor]

Good system design interview problem and solution! Thanks for sharing!

Keep in mind some interviewers look for you to ask clarifying questions at the beginning more than Tim did here. Questions on:
1. who are the users?
2. how are they going to use it?
3. what use cases are there?
4. what are the inputs and outputs?
5. how much data do we expect to handle?
6. how many requests per second do we expect?

Tim made a lot of assumptions while building his solution. This could have gone down the wrong path and wasted time.

[appsky]

This is a very good one. I've watched other interviews where they proposed to build their own protocol and use CQRS for everything. This guy kept it simple and didn't reinvent the wheel.

[radhouze]

19:57 "This looks... reasonable" lol he got her to start saying it too

[ishaanme]

I really like that he talked about finer details like data type tradeoffs (enums for car type, decimals for payment calculation), security considerations (storing hashed passwords), scalability (read replicas), and write consistency requirements. But, what made this stand apart was the specific DB details that he was able to share. That showed technical depth and is bound to ace interviews. Thanks for the good work!

[properwaffles]

Absolutely love listening to someone map something out like this on the fly, very interesting and informative.

[MSNandoKun]

What are we going to call the app? “Reasonably”🤣
Good job though

[asmitachatterjee]

Watching this as a product manager to learn more about how SDEs approach a solution. Very educational! Thank you!

[pereerecodes]

I really enjoyed this. I do and build lots of software and the design part is always very satisfying to me as you can see the whole system's wireframe before you before you even start building.

[BangMaster]

I'm gonna leave a like to this video, it seems pretty reasonable.

[oluyemiolususi]

This is a reasonable design, by a reasonable Engineer on a reasonable channel. You have got yourself a new reasonable subscriber.

[croci]

That kind of interview is quite nice. As an old system designer, I instantly started to think about the database (and normalization rules). It works as a backbone for my thinking process and it also helps me product planning and communicate with my clients by asking questions even though I do not have a database on that point.

[nimishverma]

No cross questioning, so many assumptions while designing. Very reasonable interview!

[MrOsirisDL]

I felt the system scale part can be designed/cleared in the second part right after the requirement. Because the garage system can also be designed to manage multiple garages in different locations. In this case, we can use a distribution system to handle the backend system, the endpoint and service design cant be totally different.