The Illustrated GenAI System Design Casebook: 10 Interview Cases, Explained in Pictures

The system design round is where GenAI interviews are won or lost. This casebook works ten of the most common questions from the first clarifying question to the final numbers, each with a one-page diagram you can redraw from memory.

Every case has the same layout:

• Open with this: a short summary to say in the first minute

• Clarify first: the questions to ask, and the answers the case assumes

• The picture: the whole design on one page

• Walk the design, step by step

• The numbers: cost, size or speed, worked out

• Trade-offs to say out loud

• Where it breaks, and the guard for each failure

• How you'd prove it works

• What interviewers ask next, with short answers

The ten cases: customer support assistant with tools, AI pull-request reviewer, multi-tenant "chat with your documents", IT helpdesk agent with approvals, text-to-SQL for business users, invoice extraction pipeline, internal LLM gateway, eval and monitoring system, voice agent for a clinic, and a web research assistant.

Also inside: a seven-step answer shape for any design question, a page of numbers worth knowing, a one-page checklist and a two-week practice plan.

50 pages. Two PDFs included: a dark screen edition and a light print edition. It builds on The Illustrated GenAI Interview, but you can use it without the book.

Refunds: because this is an instant download, all sales are final. If a file won't open or the download fails, email illustratedengineer@kronosautomation.com and we'll fix it.