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Code RoomContent-based pub-sub broker
HardPrep Room Coding #3630

Content-based pub-sub broker

System designDistributed systemsSenior–Staff~45 min

Design a content-based / topic pub-sub broker that supports hierarchical topics and wildcard subscriptions (e.g. sensors/+/temperature, orders/us/#) plus attribute filters (price > 100 AND region = 'eu'). Scale: 5M active subscriptions, 1M messages/sec, and a single message may match thousands of subscriptions. Matching must be fast enough not to bottleneck publish throughput, and subscriptions change frequently.

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.

Clarify5:00 left
Estimate5:00 planned
Design15:00 planned
Deep dive12:00 planned
Failure8:00 planned
0:00
Which questions mattered is sealed until you submit. Telling you now would just be handing over the edge cases.