A free live masterclass built for senior and staff backend engineers who can code well but struggle when asked to design a distributed system on a whiteboard. Led by hiring managers from Google, Meta and Netflix.
You have spent years writing production backend systems. You can implement a binary search in your sleep, reason about time complexity, and review a pull request with sharp eyes. And yet, the moment an interviewer writes a vague prompt on a whiteboard and says 'design Twitter', something stops working.
Most senior engineers who fail system design rounds do not fail because they lack knowledge. They fail because they have never been taught a structured way to approach an open-ended problem under pressure. They spend too long on the wrong thing, miss a key trade-off the interviewer was looking for, or scope the problem too narrowly and run out of steam before the deep dive.
This masterclass fixes that. In two hours you will leave with a repeatable framework, a working vocabulary for the building blocks that appear in almost every question, and a clear picture of what a hiring manager at a top company is actually evaluating when they score your round.
Six focused topics, taught by engineers who have been on the other side of the table as hiring managers at FAANG companies.
Requirements, estimation, high-level design and deep dive. A structure that keeps you on track and signals seniority to the interviewer from the first minute.
How to turn 'design YouTube' into a bounded, solvable problem without asking so many questions you waste half the interview.
Load balancing, caching, sharding, message queues and consistency trade-offs. The handful of primitives that appear in over 80 percent of design questions.
How to do back-of-the-envelope math quickly and confidently, and when the numbers actually change your design decisions.
A URL shortener and a news feed, designed end to end in real time so you can see every decision point and trade-off discussion as it happens.
The explicit rubric hiring managers use at top companies, so you know exactly what behaviours to demonstrate and which mistakes cost the most points.
The session runs live and is taught in sequence. Every module builds on the one before it.
The real reason strong engineers underperform on system design, and what the interviewer is evaluating that you may not realise.
A structured approach that works on any open-ended design question and signals clear thinking from the start.
The primitives that appear in almost every design question, and how to reason about trade-offs between them.
Design a URL shortening service from scratch, hitting every step of the framework in real time.
A harder problem with fan-out, ranking and real-time delivery. Where most candidates lose points and how to hold them.
Live questions answered, plus a roadmap for practising system design between now and your onsite.
Every instructor has been a hiring manager at a top company. They know the rubric because they helped write it.
Staff Engineer, Distributed Systems
12+ years at Google and Meta
Principal Engineer and Hiring Manager
14+ years at Netflix and Stripe
Engineering Manager, Infrastructure
10+ years at Meta
Senior Staff Engineer
11+ years at Google
25,000 engineers have come through Interview Kickstart programs. These are the outcomes they share.
Engineers who attended the masterclass, then went into their onsites.
I had failed two design rounds at top companies before this masterclass. The 4-step framework gave me a scaffold I could rely on even when my mind went blank. Cleared my Google loop three weeks later.
The live walkthroughs were exactly what I needed. Watching an instructor make real decisions in real time, including the wrong turns, was more useful than any blog post or book I had read.
I went in thinking I knew system design because I had read the textbook. I came out realising I had no idea how to communicate my thinking to an interviewer. The scoring breakdown alone was worth the two hours.
Finally an explanation of fan-out that made sense. The news feed walkthrough covered every question my Meta interviewer actually asked me. I felt like I had seen the test in advance.
The section on how interviewers score the round was the most honest thing I have heard about this process. No fluff, just what they are actually looking for and how to show it.
I have 11 years of experience and still found this masterclass taught me things I had not articulated to myself. The building blocks module alone is worth it for any senior engineer.
It is designed for backend engineers with 5 or more years of experience who are preparing for senior, staff or principal-level loops at FAANG or FAANG-adjacent companies. If you can already code well but struggle on open-ended design questions, this is for you.
No special preparation is required. You should be comfortable with basic backend concepts: REST APIs, databases, and writing server-side code. The masterclass builds the system design layer on top of that foundation.
The masterclass covers the foundations: the framework, the building blocks and two live walkthroughs. The full course goes deeper across 16 weeks, with mock interviews, personalised feedback, and coverage of every question type you will see at a top company. The masterclass is the best starting point.
A replay is available for registered attendees for a limited period after the live session. Live attendance is strongly recommended because the Q&A at the end covers questions specific to the group, and those answers are not replayed.
Yes. The masterclass is completely free to attend. There is no payment, no credit card and no trial period. At the end of the session we will share information about Interview Kickstart's paid programs for engineers who want to go further.
The books give you knowledge. This masterclass gives you a framework for deploying that knowledge under interview conditions, and tells you how the person across the table is scoring what you say. Most engineers who have read the books still find the masterclass shifts how they think about actually performing in the room.
The examples and scoring rubrics are drawn from Google, Meta, Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Uber and Stripe. The framework itself applies to any company running a system design loop.
Takes about 30 seconds to register. Seats are limited.
