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Loom senior / L5 system design interview, what to expect

mobile_mara · 5 replies

Just wrapped up my loop at Loom (senior SWE, L5-equivalent). Posting because I couldn't find much specific info before I went in.

System design was 60 minutes with two engineers. They gave me a prompt that was essentially: design a video recording and sharing platform. Which, yeah, they use internally as a reference but they're not going to tell you "design Loom." The framing was more abstract, something like design a system to capture, store, and deliver short video clips at scale.

What mattered: They pushed hard on the storage layer. CDN choice, chunked upload, handling large files. They wanted to hear you think through blob storage vs. a managed video service. Latency questions came up fast. How do you make playback feel instant? Adaptive bitrate, preloading segments, what do you do when the viewer is on a slow connection. They asked about the notification / link-sharing side too. How do you generate a shareable link, track views, handle access control. This surprised me a little, I expected to stay on the infra side longer. One of the interviewers specifically asked how you'd handle the recording client losing connection mid-upload. Error recovery, partial uploads, resumable uploads. That got a bit deep.

The interviewers were genuinely engaged, not just waiting for you to hit the "right" answer. They pushed on tradeoffs rather than fishing for a specific solution.

Timing felt tight. 60 minutes goes fast when you're covering upload pipeline, storage, CDN, access control, and edge cases. I'd practice keeping your initial architecture pass to 15-20 minutes so there's room to dig.

No particular emphasis on specific cloud providers. AWS/GCP both came up in my answer and no one flinched either way.

Overall I'd say it's a solid system design round. Not a gotcha, but not easy either. The video domain adds interesting wrinkles that a generic "design Twitter" prep won't fully cover.

5 replies

infra_ines

The resumable uploads question is such a Loom-specific detail. Makes sense they'd care about that. Did they go into how you'd handle the client-side piece or was it mostly backend?

remote_swe_42

Mostly backend. They touched on the client side briefly but when I started talking about chunked XHR they moved on pretty quickly. I think they cared more about what happens on the server when a chunk arrives out of order or a retry comes in.

jp_newgrad

Did they level check at all during the design? Like did they expect staff-level depth on every component or was senior-level coverage across the board fine?

remote_swe_42

They seemed happy with senior-level coverage across the board. I went deep on 2-3 areas when they probed and stayed higher level on the rest. Nobody pushed me to go deep on everything at once.

frontend_fran

Thanks for this. I have a Loom loop coming up in two weeks and I was just reading generic SD prep. The video domain stuff is a good reminder that context matters.