English for software engineer system design interview

What you’ll practice

Present architecture decisions clearly: requirements, components, bottlenecks, and scaling strategy.

Questions

• What are the non-functional requirements for this system?
• Why did you choose asynchronous processing here?
• Where is the likely bottleneck at 10x traffic?

Useful phrases

• “Let me clarify constraints before proposing architecture.”
• “I chose this approach to reduce latency at the cost of complexity.”
• “At scale, I would shard by… and add caching at…”

Mini role-play

Interviewer: “Why not a monolith?” You: “A modular monolith can work early, but independent scaling of ingestion and processing favors separate services.”

FAQ

Should I draw first or speak first?

State assumptions first, then sketch the high-level flow.