Track 5 · Design Interview Problems
Design YouTube / Netflix (Global Video Streaming)
From 4K creator upload to 360p playback on a moving bus. How chunking, transcoding pipelines, and CDN edge caching deliver stutter-free video at petabyte scale.
Interview problem25 min read
On this page
- Problem framing
- Questions I ask before drawing anything
- Requirements
- Estimation
- API design
- Database schema
- The video processing and transcoding pipeline
- Adaptive Bitrate Streaming (ABR)
- Evolutionary architecture: v1 MVP to v2 Distributed scale
- CDN caching strategy: making 95%+ hits reality
- Edge cases and failure recovery
- Cross-questions interviewers will ask
- Interview Rubric: Mid-Level vs Senior / Staff