Code Room
System designHardsd-g448
Subject Geo replicationLevel Senior–Staff~50 minCommon in Databases & SQL · Distributed systems interviewsIndustries Technology

Question

Design the data architecture for a global identity/profile service where each user's PII (name, address, government ID, contact info) must be physically stored only in the user's home jurisdiction (EU PII in the EU, India PII in India, US PII in the US) to satisfy data-residency law, yet every region's application must be able to render any user's display name and avatar quickly for cross-border interactions (a US user views an EU user's profile in a shared workspace). Scale: 800M users, profile reads 1000x writes, p95 read 80ms anywhere. Cleanly separate what may replicate globally from what may not, define how a request in one region fetches residency-bound data legally, and address the 'right to be deleted' obligation that the data live in exactly one place.

What a strong answer looks like

Clarify scale and constraints first. Propose a clean component breakdown, then go deep on the hard parts — data model, bottlenecks, consistency, failure modes — and name the trade-offs you are making.

Narrate your design
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Run or narrate your approach, then ask the coach.