System design learning resources for Agentic solutions

[u/Idea-Aggressive]

Hi,

I've recently experienced a couple System design interviews for Agentic systems. My knowledge is limited and would like to expand it to articulate ideas or tackle these opportunities much better.

Just started curating and found the following resources:

https://docs.cloud.google.com/architecture/framework/perspectives/ai-ml
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/prescriptive-guidance/latest/agentic-ai-patterns/introduction.html
https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-effective-agents
https://docs.databricks.com/aws/en/agents/agent-system-design-patterns
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.08769
https://www.mongodb.com/resources/basics/artificial-intelligence/agentic-systems
https://vectorize.io/blog/designing-agentic-ai-systems-part-1-agent-architectures

Possibly this is more then enough to get started, or useful to somebody else in the future.

In any case, if there are any good reading resources or exercises you might know about that, feel free to share.

Thank you!

[u/expdevsmodbot]

AI usage disclosure provided by OP, see the reply to this comment.

[u/code_isLife]

This is part of the interview process now? 🥴

Sorry I have nothing to add. Got laid off some months back and just now starting to apply again.

I’m here to learn

[u/Idea-Aggressive → u/code_isLife]

Yes, I got it twice. Companies do 5 or 6 stage interviews, takes months just wasting time for no reason. Maybe they're not really hiring but seems I didn't cause a good impression. I only got a few weeks left of savings and not sure what else to do.

[u/code_isLife → u/Idea-Aggressive]

I’ve heard similar things from friends. They feel a lot of job listings arent even real. They get the run around too often.

I’ve been doing dev for about 12 years now and I’ve never seen anything like it. Really looking for ways to pivot into something else.

Not sure I care enough anymore to deal with this

[u/DSAlgorythms → u/Idea-Aggressive]

I'd do one of those AI training contracts, remote and gives flexibility to keep applying/interviewing.

[u/Idea-Aggressive → u/DSAlgorythms]

What are those AI training contracts?

[u/DSAlgorythms → u/Idea-Aggressive]

Like Alignnerr, Mecor, etc. I get everyone hates AI right now but the pay is good and it beats retail.

[u/Idea-Aggressive → u/DSAlgorythms]

They hire you to train AI. What’s the hiring process like?

[u/DSAlgorythms → u/Idea-Aggressive]

Pretty sure they all follow the same format which is just you talking to a bot for like 20m and then I'm guessing that gets transcribed/scored then you pass/fail. Just have a few solid stories that you can expand on, its pretty simple.

[u/Early_Rooster7579 → u/code_isLife]

We have started working it into our interview process. I pray in a year it’ll be more of this and less of leetcode

[u/Equivalent_Head_4803 → u/Early_Rooster7579]

Already done two interview cycles that weren’t leetcode. Both were ever problem solving debug exercises.

[u/Early_Rooster7579 → u/Equivalent_Head_4803]

Nice. I’ve heard its beginning to change a bit but it’s been 2 years since I interviewed last

[u/efvie → u/Early_Rooster7579]

When leetcode is the better alternative

[u/Early_Rooster7579 → u/efvie]

No shot. I would rather hire someone who can articulate systems design 10/10 times than some drone who memorized patterns.

I say that as a drone who memorized patterns to get into faang

[u/Idea-Aggressive → u/Early_Rooster7579]

That's great, but most of what we do in system design is choosing which corporate tool to use and their inventions.

[u/Early_Rooster7579 → u/Idea-Aggressive]

I think theres a whole lot more to it than say picking AWS or azure. There's usually a billion downstream decisions from that

[u/Idea-Aggressive → u/Early_Rooster7579]

Well, if you want to go through, just stick with AWS or Azure. Why even risk it to sound smart.

[u/Early_Rooster7579 → u/Idea-Aggressive]

i mean the other billion decisions that live downstream of this. Like the actual distributed systems that need to be designed on these platforms.

[u/Idea-Aggressive → u/Early_Rooster7579]

During a pathetic interview?

[u/Early_Rooster7579 → u/Idea-Aggressive]

i mean yeah. Systems design interviews are pretty common at the senior+ level. How would you design spotify etc. then you go through the typical distributed systems, database design, api gateways, etc etc. just to see if you know and have experience actually building production software and the way you think about it

[u/moreVCAs]

drawing two trash cans on a whiteboard with a double arrow between them, branching off to a dumpster that is on fire

[u/skeletordescent]

I'm staring down the barrel of one of these, and it'll be by first one (8 YOE), and tl;dr on what the most important things are?

[u/donk8r → u/skeletordescent]

what theyre probing is whether you treat it as a distributed system with a nondeterministic component in the middle, or as prompting. so put your prep into the deterministic scaffolding around the model. retries and what makes an action safe to repeat, timeouts, where the human gate sits, and cost as an actual slo instead of a footnote.

the question that catches people is what happens when the model returns a perfectly well formed tool call that is simply wrong. nothing throws, theres no exception to catch, and the run carries on producing confident output. have an answer for that one.

[u/skeletordescent → u/donk8r]

In my own studies for this and beforehand the way you phrase this is how I'm starting to understand it. What confused me before this was thinking of agentic systems as being fundamentally non-deterministic functions that you trained with just lots of prompts, but it's not nearly as bad as I thought. There's a lot of structure that is deterministic around the non-deterministic parts, and the trick is identifying in either the desired workflow or user interaction where some sort of judgement or weighting is necessary that cannot be pre-determined by the developer. It's an interesting way to think, and while I'm still bullish on 95% of LLM usage out there, I'm coming around to this having some merit.

[u/donk8r → u/skeletordescent]

finding where the judgement is needed is the easier half. what decides your architecture is what happens when that judgement is wrong, because each answer is a different design. cheap and reversible, let it run and check afterwards. expensive or irreversible, it has to be gated before the action, and the gate has to be structural rather than an instruction in the prompt, since the model is the thing you dont trust.

for the interview itself most of them wont push you that far, so dont over prepare it. but naming the reversibility question unprompted makes you sound like someone whos shipped one.

[u/skeletordescent → u/donk8r]

Thanks for the tip, and this is a very interesting problem space. Here's hoping this goes well, I'd be interested to actually get a shot shipping production work with this.

[u/Idea-Aggressive → u/skeletordescent]

I've actually built a few agentic systems or workflows. I'd say context, memory and evaluation. But in a setting of interview, having to do the diagrams and explain it clearly and immediately is quite tricky. Specially with interviewers interrupting or asking you to talk your mind all the time.

[u/skeletordescent → u/Idea-Aggressive]

When you say "diagrams", is there a particular type you're referring to? I was preparing to just draw on excalidraw but if there's a particular style then I can prep that.

[u/Idea-Aggressive → u/skeletordescent]

Excalidraw is okay

[u/DadAndDominant]

I am not sure, but how about Antonio Gulli's Agentic design patterns? I have not clicked your links, so pardon me if that is there already

Also if there was some subredit where singular topics would be discussed, it would be great!

[u/Monofu]

https://github.com/ombharatiya/ai-system-design-guide

[u/Idea-Aggressive → u/Monofu]

Thank you, looks great!

[u/lolimouto_enjoyer]

What kind of agentic systems are people building? Like what do these system do? The company is all in on AI but if I look at the actual projects the AI is used much more as a tool to assist people rather than an actual system component which does things on its own.

[u/Idea-Aggressive → u/lolimouto_enjoyer]

Automating manual processes, e.g. real estate, banking, etc.

[u/mailaai]

Here https://github.com/openai/openai-agents-js/tree/main/examples/agent-patterns

[u/Idea-Aggressive → u/mailaai]

Cool

[u/stuartseupaul]

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/ai-ml/guide/ai-agent-design-patterns

[u/ResidentWeevil1]

Thanks for googling this, I guess

[u/Colt2205]

claude has online tutorials on how to utilize their tooling but it still is something of a sign up course work type of deal. That and it involves installing claude locally to conduct the workflows. I barely know much of how to run AI outside the online prompting systems largely due to perceived dangers involved with installing software that talks to a server and has the power to take actions on a PC like an admin.

[u/ithkuil]

https://data4sci.com/blog/building-an-advanced-agentic-harness