Understand the system’s purpose.
Develop the design through business context, customer journeys, capabilities, and a structured architecture method.
The book · Apress
System Design with AI Interview Guide
Designing Scalable, Agentic, and Defensible Systems
By Rohit Bhardwaj
Build a structured approach to an unfamiliar design problem. Connect business goals to architecture, reason through AI and distributed-system constraints, and practice explaining the consequences of your choices.
24 chapters spanning system design methodology, technical fundamentals, and applied systems.
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Browse the publisher’s contents and book details ↗Inside the book
From the problem to a defensible design.
For developers preparing for system design interviews and architects extending their design practice to AI systems.
Examine the difficult constraints.
Study AI primitives, trust, control, scale, consistency, latency, failure, and economics.
Use the ideas in context.
Work through architectures such as ride sharing, social networking, and e-commerce, then explain the trade-offs.
Explore the full table of contents on the publisher’s page ↗.
Use the book with the circle
Read a concept. Try it on a problem.
Choose a problem, sketch your approach, and use AI to challenge it. Continue with a free guide, write down the decision in a worksheet, and bring a question to the live conversation.
A look inside the free PDF
Design Decision Worksheet
Put a real design decision on the page. Start with the outcome, trace one interaction, and name what must remain true.
The complete worksheet adds constraints, alternatives, the recommendation, failure tests, and the evidence that would reopen your decision.
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Outcome and scope
Who needs what outcome? What is included in this decision, and what is outside it?
Critical interaction
Trace one request from the user to the recorded result. Mark who owns the decision.
What must remain true?
State the invariant or required behavior. Example: two overlapping bookings for one room cannot both be confirmed.
Read the prompts here. Use the PDF to record your own reasoning.
Before you choose your reading path
Do I need to buy the book to participate?
No. The live series and published learning resources are free to explore. The book offers a companion for deeper study.
Which book destination should I use?
Choose Amazon to view its purchase options, or O’Reilly to see the reading access available through that platform. Each provider shows its own current terms and availability.
Where should I begin after reading?
Choose one design question from the resource library. Explain your approach aloud, write down a trade-off, and change one assumption to test the reasoning.