System Design
Design systems you could be paged for at 3am.
- Duration
- 8 weeks
- Commitment
- 5 hrs/week
- Level
- intermediate
- Modules
- 3
Textbook system design teaches the happy path. Production teaches the rest. This cohort starts from failure and works backwards.
By the end
What you’ll be able to do
Distributed systems reasoning grounded in failure - consistency, queues, storage, and the tradeoffs that only show up under load.
- 01Reason about consistency without reciting CAP
- 02Pick a datastore for stated reasons you can defend
- 03Design for backpressure before it designs for you
- 04Write a design doc a staff engineer would sign off
Format
Schedule
Next cohort
Prerequisites
- Two or more years building backend services
- Working knowledge of SQL and HTTP
Curriculum
3 modules, in the order they bite
Failure as the design input
- Partial failure
- Timeouts and retries
- Idempotency keys
- Blast radius
State
- Replication
- Consistency models
- Partitioning
- Hot keys
Flow
- Queues
- Backpressure
- Exactly-once as a fiction
- Outbox pattern
- Partial failure
- Timeouts and retries
- Idempotency keys
- Blast radius
- Replication
- Consistency models
- Partitioning
- Hot keys
- Queues
- Backpressure
- Exactly-once as a fiction
- Outbox pattern
Who teaches it
Pavan Jegurupati
Taught around systems that actually ran, including the ones that broke. Every session is live, and the project you build is reviewed by the person who wrote the module.
Pricing
One price, one cohort, no upsell
Everything the cohort includes is in the price. There is no premium tier, and nothing is held back for one.
- Every live session, plus the recordings
- A cumulative project reviewed by the instructor
- Written feedback on your project at two checkpoints
- Cohort channel access that stays open afterwards
System Design
₹42,999
- Status
- Cohort in progress
- Cohort
- 4
- Runs
- 18 Aug 2026 – 20 Oct 2026
- Sessions
- Wed & Sat, 7:30-9:00 PM IST
- Seats
- 0 of 45 left
Waitlist
Hear about the next cohort first
Cohorts are small and dates move. The waitlist gets the date and the early-bird window before the site does.
Questions
Before you enrol
Anything not answered here is worth an email — the reply comes from the person teaching it.
Ask something elseIt will help, but that is a side effect. The course is organised around operating systems in production, which is a broader and harder target than the interview format.