Gaurav Sen System Design May 2026

Sen often begins by explaining how to handle growth. While (adding more RAM/CPU to one machine) is easy, it has a hard ceiling. Horizontal Scaling (adding more machines) is the industry standard for high-level systems, though it introduces the complexity of data synchronization. 2. Microservices Architecture

Try to replicate his whiteboard drawings for a "URL Shortener" or "Instagram News Feed" without looking at the solution.

Learn about NoSQL vs. SQL and Message Queues (like Kafka). gaurav sen system design

He emphasizes that there is no "perfect" system—only a series of trade-offs between consistency, availability, and partition tolerance (the CAP theorem). Core Pillars of System Design (According to Sen)

Mimicking a real-world interview, he starts with a blank canvas and builds the architecture piece by piece. Sen often begins by explaining how to handle growth

How to handle billions of messages with end-to-end encryption and "seen" receipts.

Watch his videos on Load Balancers, Caching, and Proxies. SQL and Message Queues (like Kafka)

Most academic resources on system design are dense and theoretical. Gaurav Sen flipped the script by focusing on . His teaching style typically involves:

Gaurav Sen is best known for his "System Design of..." series. Some of his most popular breakdowns include:

The complexities of location-based searching (Geospatial indexing).