Part 4 — Load Balancer Interview Q&A (Staff and Principal Level)

maang.io System Design Series

What is this?

Think of this part as sitting across the table from a mentor doing mock interviews with you. For each question we'll do three things: figure out what the interviewer is really asking, walk through a strong answer, and call out the one line that makes you sound senior instead of junior.

The big secret: at Staff/Principal level, nobody's impressed that you know what a load balancer is. They're listening for whether you understand its failure modes, its operational reality, and its place in a bigger system. Name the trade-off, pick a default, say why. That's the whole game.