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AI System Design Interviews at Staff Level (2026)

Hosted by Ehsan Gazar

90 students

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Production-Ready Systems with LLMs and Agents: An Intensive for Engineers
Ehsan Gazar
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What you'll learn

Name the failure mode before the component

Open with what breaks under load, then choose parts. This is the move that reads as staff rather than senior.

Price the architecture you just proposed

Attach a cost per request to each component and defend the total. A design with no number is only an opinion.

Hear one prompt answered at senior, then at staff

The same AI system design prompt answered both ways, live, so you can hear exactly where the two diverge.

Leave with a staff-level answer rubric

A one-page rubric you can rehearse against before your next AI system design interview.

Why this topic matters

Two engineers get the same AI system design prompt. One lists components. The other names the failure mode first, picks the component that survives it, then prices what they proposed. The second answer is what staff sounds like, and it is learnable. We work on a whiteboard, nothing else: no slides, no tooling, no repo. You leave with a rubric you can rehearse against before your next interview.

You'll learn from

Ehsan Gazar

Staff Software Engineer at Tipalti

I'm a Staff Software Engineer with 16 years building and scaling production systems across fintech, SaaS, and enterprise software. I've made hundreds of architectural decisions in systems that had to survive real traffic, incidents, and org politics.

I've run 500+ mentorship sessions with senior engineers at a 5.0 rating, helping them close the gap between writing code and thinking at the architectural level. I've also taught 10,000+ students and distilled what separates engineers who get promoted from those who stay stuck.

I'm not an academic. Every framework here comes from real decisions or mistakes I had to recover from. I’ll teach you to think like a Staff Software Engineer: not “what’s the right answer,” but “what are the trade-offs, and what survives contact with reality.”

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