Designing TikTok from Scratch — A System Design Deep Dive
Daniel Keya
Who is this for? Mid-to-senior engineers preparing for system design interviews, or anyone curious how a short-video platform at billion-user scale actually works under the hood. Scale We're Designing For Metric Number Monthly active users 1B+ Videos uploaded per day ~34 million Target feed latency (P99) ~167ms Peak egress bandwidth ~26 Tbps 1. Requirements Before drawing a single box, nail down what the system must do — and what it doesn't need to do perfectly on day one. Functional requirement