This ONE Question Destroys Senior Engineers (Rate Limiter Interview) #systemdesign #techinterview

A senior engineer gets stress-tested on designing a distributed rate limiter — and the interviewer doesn't go easy. 🔥

Token bucket vs sliding window. Burst traffic at the window boundary. Race conditions under thousands of parallel requests. And the killer question: when Redis goes down, do you fail-open or fail-closed?

This is Day 7 of our senior software engineer interview series — real interview pressure, real trade-offs, real answers.

Covered in this interview:
• Sliding window log: accurate at boundaries, terrible memory at scale
• Token bucket in Redis with Lua scripts for atomic check-and-decrement
• Graceful degradation: local in-memory fallback when Redis fails
• Fail-open vs fail-closed: why availability beats strict consistency here
• Hot key mitigation when one API key hammers a single shard

Want to practice against an AI interviewer that pushes back like this? Try Skillora — unlimited mock interviews for coding, system design, and behavioral rounds.

#SystemDesign #TechInterview #SoftwareEngineering #RateLimiter #Redis #DistributedSystems #CodingInterview #SeniorEngineer #Shorts

Видео This ONE Question Destroys Senior Engineers (Rate Limiter Interview) #systemdesign #techinterview канала Skillora