Build a queue around visibility leases and explicit acknowledgement, then add replicated partitions, FIFO groups, tenant fairness and bounded redrive: three self-contained interview boards.
Infrastructure, platform and reliability engineers.
Your approach: Use diagrams or prose to explain responsibilities, state, capacity and failure behavior. Show the calculations requested by the question.
Design a Message Queue like Amazon SQS. Build a queue around visibility leases and explicit acknowledgement, then add replicated partitions, FIFO groups, tenant fairness and bounded redrive: three self-contained interview boards. Work from the scoping questions below. State assumptions for any unspecified load, guarantee or target, then trace your design end to end. Explain one difficult case and a credible alternative; the worked example is a reference, not a required implementation.
Resolve the scoping questions for a Message Queue like Amazon SQS. Separate stated behavior from assumptions, and identify what is outside your design.
Declare relevant volume, latency, freshness, quality or cost targets with units. Show calculations or an evaluation plan that can test them; unspecified targets are your assumptions, not hidden pass criteria.
Explain how your guarantees hold in a difficult case relevant to this subject. Address: Poison messages? Delay?
Identify users, required behavior and exclusions. Answer: Guarantees? Scale?
Define the information owned by the system and the inputs, outputs and errors at its boundaries. Resolve: Latency? How long do messages live?
Estimate the dominant workload and resource demand with units and explicit assumptions. For a learned system, also state how quality is measured and what data is available.
Draw or describe the responsibilities needed for a Message Queue like Amazon SQS. Trace a representative request, event or job from its input to a visible result; identify durable state owners.
Walk through a difficult case step by step, including detection and recovery. Consider: How long may a consumer hold a message? Order on standard queues? Poison messages? Delay?
Compare a credible alternative using your chosen workload and guarantees. Explain a remaining risk, a signal to watch and when you would change the design.