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Ask HN: How to study for system design that doesn't include front end/back end?

38 points 3a2d29 | 1 comments | 13 Mar 25 23:32 UTC | HN request time: 0.216s | source

I got a system design interview where I was asked to build a pricer for a financial product, then expand it to multiple pricers that might share inputs.

This was not the typical system design interview where you have to deal with APIs / load balancers / latency / etc

I have studied that a lot, but what about these type of general interviews?

1. creakingstairs ◴[14 Mar 25 00:00 UTC] No.43358436[source]▶
IMO domain knowledge is crucial here. I don’t know anything about pricier or financial products so hard to reason about the system.

But to give a general advice, I’d approach it by trying to break down the domain into concepts, then think about how those concepts can be turned into abstractions. Then you can think about relationships between those abstractions and engineering solutions for those relationships.

Also, systems all take inputs and produce outputs. Validating those would be another interesting aspect given its finances related.