About this experience
Learn how large systems are designed and kept running from a staff engineer who does it daily. Using a realistic sample design doc, you will run a design review the way big tech teams do: requirements, trade-offs, failure modes and capacity planning.
Arjun then walks through anonymized incident post-mortems from real outages, what went wrong and how the fix was found. The session ends with career talk: interviews, leveling, promotions and what staff engineers actually spend their time on.
Your day
- 10:00 AM
Architecture overview
Whiteboard how a large-scale service handles traffic, storage and caching.
1 hr
- 11:00 AM
Design review
Review a sample design doc together and argue the trade-offs.
1 hr
- 12:00 PM
Lunch
Lunch in South Lake Union.
1 hr
- 1:00 PM
On-call war stories
Walk through anonymized post-mortems and practice debugging a simulated outage.
1 hr 15 min
- 2:15 PM
Career Q&A
Interviewing, leveling and growing from senior to staff.
What’s included
- Lunch
- Sample design doc and post-mortem templates
- Resume or design doc review by email afterward
Good to know
- Held at a co-working space, not inside any employer’s office; no proprietary or confidential information is shared.
- Bring a laptop. Some programming experience helps but is not required.
Your curator
Arjun Mehta14 years in backend and distributed systemsArjun Mehta has spent his career on backend infrastructure at large tech companies, most recently leading the storage layer for a service used by millions of people. He has written and reviewed dozens of system design documents. He mentors engineers moving from senior to staff level.
View Arjun’s profile
