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Distributed systems questions cover partitioning, consistency, coordination and failure handling — the core vocabulary of every system design interview.
Distributed systems is the substrate of the system design interview. Once a design outgrows one machine, every subsequent decision is a distributed systems decision: how data is partitioned, what happens during a network partition, how nodes agree on anything, and which failures the system is expected to survive rather than merely detect.
The most reliable way to sound senior is to be specific about failure. Interviewers ask what happens when a node dies, when the network splits, when a message is delivered twice — and they are listening for consistency choices made per data type rather than globally. Naming the partition key and what it makes expensive, and treating retries as requiring idempotency rather than hoping for the best, are the two details that come up in almost every design.
23 system design · 1 cloud architecture · 3/9/12 easy/medium/hard
Enough to apply it: what the CAP theorem constrains during a partition, why quorums work, what consistent hashing buys when a node joins. Interviews reward applying these to a design, not reciting definitions.
Saying "we will shard the database" without naming the shard key. The key determines which queries stay cheap and which become scatter-gather, and the follow-up question is always what that choice makes expensive.