Code Room
System designHardsd-g486
Subject TranscodingLevel Senior–Staff~45 minCommon in Distributed systems interviewsIndustries Technology, Software development

Question

Design the scheduler for a transcoding compute farm that runs millions of encode jobs/day across a mix of cheap interruptible spot instances and a small reserved on-demand fleet. Jobs have wildly different priorities and SLAs: a creator's just-uploaded short must transcode in <60s (interactive), a backfill re-encode of the back catalog can take hours, and a few live-to-VOD jobs are deadline-critical. You want to minimize cost (favor spot) while still hitting the interactive SLA and surviving spot reclamations that can yank 30% of capacity with a 2-minute warning.

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.