System designHardsd-p082

Subject Queues streamingLevel Senior–Staff~45 minCommon in Distributed systems interviewsIndustries Technology, Software development

Question

Design a workflow orchestration engine that runs multi-step business processes (each step may call services, wait, retry) reliably and survives crashes mid-process (like Temporal or Step Functions).

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.

Learn the concepts

Narrate your design

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Run or narrate your approach, then ask the coach.