System Design & Backend Architecture Review with Navratna Vats

System design is where most backend developers either level up, or get filtered out.

I've cleared system design rounds at Amazon and Google, as well as multiple design rounds during my switch period, and chose to work at UiPath, where I now deal with real distributed systems, Azure SQL, EF Core, and production incidents daily. As the DRI for weekly SRE on-call, I investigate slow queries, elastic pool contention, and broken pipelines and write the RCAs. This information isn't textbook knowledge.

In this session, we can tackle the following:

→ Mock system design: I give you a problem, you design it, I give honest feedback

→ SQL performance deep dive: indexes, query plans, pagination anti-patterns

→ Distributed system patterns: job queues, async processing, retry logic

→ Review your actual architecture with specific improvement suggestions

→ Azure infra concepts: elastic pools, failover, DTU vs vCore trade-offs

I'll tell you what actually breaks in production and how it gets fixed, not just what the ideal design looks like on a whiteboard.

Best for: Developers with 2+ years of experience preparing for senior-level interviews or dealing with real architecture and performance challenges at work.