October 13, 2024
I'm looking forward to an interview for a software engineer position at StubHub. It offers work with microservices, kubernetes, and cloud-native technologies. The position focuses on DevOps, such as infrastructure, build, deployment, and artifact management. I'm excited because my current experience aligns with the position's focus. This will be an improvement for my career as it offers better compensation and location (Santa Monica!).
I checked Glassdoor, and it sounds like the technical interview question will be easier than Google was. It will likely be a LeetCode medium or easy question, but there was mention of a system design question. Several people said they were asked to design an email processing system. So, I want to write about how I would design such a system.
Emails will be received through an API provided by the email hosting service.
The API will have a /send endpoint that the email provider can call to send an email to a user.
The API will have a /receive endpoint that the email provider can call to receive an email at a specific address.
Once an email is received, it needs to be parsed. The content and metadata needs to be extracted. The content needs to be converted to a format that can be processed by the system. This would likely be a JSON blog format to be stored in a database.
Emails need to be categorized, at the least by their sender and receiver. This will allow for the user and administrator to view their sent and received emails.
Emails need to be routed to the correct user. This will allow for the user to view their emails. This will be done by using their email address to look up the user ID in the database.. Then, the email's content which was stored earlier will have its ID added to the user's received emails. This could be stored as a one-to-many relationship.
Emails need to be stored in a database. The database will need to be able to store the email's content, metadata, and tags. Since this data is structured, it is a good fit for a structured SQL database like Postgres.
Emails can be exposed to the user in their client. To do this, the data must be exposed through an API. This will follow an email protocol such as SMTP, POP, or IMAP. We follow the common protocols so the the user can use any email client to access their emails.
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