60-Day Interview Preparation Roadmap

A comprehensive 60-day plan to prepare for system design interviews at top tech companies.

60-Day System Design Interview Preparation

This plan prepares you for system design interviews at FAANG and top tech companies. It builds on fundamental knowledge and focuses heavily on practice.

Phase 1: Foundations (Days 1-15)

Complete the 30-Day Roadmap's weeks 1-3 in 15 days (double the daily study time).

Phase 2: Distributed Systems (Days 16-25)

Day	Topic	Time
16	Consistent Hashing	60 min
17	Consensus Algorithms (Raft, Paxos overview)	60 min
18	Service Discovery and Heartbeats	45 min
19	Distributed Locking	60 min
20	Circuit Breaker and Gossip Protocol	45 min
21	Microservices vs Monolith	60 min
22	Event-Driven Architecture	60 min
23	Change Data Capture (CDC)	45 min
24	Distributed Tracing	45 min
25	Review: All distributed systems concepts	90 min

Phase 3: Interview Framework (Days 26-30)

Day	Topic	Time
26	Step-by-step interview framework	60 min
27	Back-of-envelope estimation practice	60 min
28	API design practice	60 min
29	Database schema design practice	60 min
30	Communication strategy and time management	60 min

Phase 4: Easy Problems (Days 31-36)

One problem per day: URL Shortener, Autocomplete, Load Balancer, CDN, Key-Value Store, Authentication System.

Phase 5: Medium Problems (Days 37-48)

One problem per day: WhatsApp, Instagram, Netflix, Twitter, Notification Service, Job Scheduler, Rate Limiter, Payment System, Spotify, YouTube, E-Commerce, Digital Wallet.

Phase 6: Hard Problems (Days 49-56)

One problem per day: Uber, Google Docs, Google Maps, Dropbox, Distributed Web Crawler, Code Deployment, Cloud Storage, Ticket Booking.

Phase 7: Review and Mock Interviews (Days 57-60)

Day	Activity
57	Review weakest areas, re-do 2 problems
58	Mock interview #1 with a friend
59	Mock interview #2 (different problem)
60	Final review, confidence building