AI-Era System Design & Architecture Mastery Katas
Classic system design teaches you how to scale requests. AI-era architecture teaches you how to scale reasoning, retrieval, tokens, tools, trust, and cost.
In the AI era, the best architects do not just draw boxes. They design authority, evidence, fallback, observability, and cost controls into every system.
Modern system design has entered a new era. It’s no longer enough to optimize for uptime and latency — today’s systems must also be AI-ready, token-efficient, trustworthy, and resilient. Whether building global-scale apps, powering recommendation engines, or integrating GenAI agents, architects need new skills and playbooks to design for scale, speed, and reliability.
This full-day workshop blends classic distributed systems knowledge with AI-native thinking. Through case studies, frameworks, and hands-on design sessions, you’ll learn to design systems that balance performance, cost, resilience, and truthfulness — and walk away with reusable templates you can apply to interviews and real-world architectures.
Learning Outcomes
By the end of this workshop, participants will be able to:
- Apply a 7-step AI-era system design framework to both interviews and real-world architecture reviews.
- Design systems that scale across requests, users, regions, tokens, retrieval calls, model latency, and inference cost.
- Architect production-grade RAG 2.0 pipelines using chunking, embeddings, hybrid search, reranking, GraphRAG, semantic caching, and freshness controls.
- Design agentic architectures with bounded tools, permission scopes, human escalation, audit trails, and safe degradation.
- Build multi-provider resilience strategies using model routing, fallback models, circuit breakers, budget caps, and graceful degradation ladders.
- Apply AI security patterns for prompt injection, indirect prompt injection, data exfiltration, unsafe tool use, and authorization bypass.
- Define AI observability and SLOs for hallucination rate, grounding quality, retrieval precision, drift, latency, token cost, and escalation rate.
- Practice architecture katas for e-commerce, ride-sharing, search, fraud detection, social feed, video streaming, and AI assistants.
- Defend trade-offs under interview pressure using clear diagrams, capacity estimates, failure-mode reasoning, and cost-aware decisions.
- Leave with reusable templates for AI System Design Canvas, RAG Checklist, Agent Safety Checklist, Token Capacity Planner, AI SLO Dashboard, and Chaos Runbook.
About Rohit Bhardwaj
Rohit Bhardwaj is a Director of Architecture working at Salesforce. Rohit has extensive experience architecting multi-tenant cloud-native solutions in Resilient Microservices Service-Oriented architectures using AWS Stack. In addition, Rohit has a proven ability in designing solutions and executing and delivering transformational programs that reduce costs and increase efficiencies.
As a trusted advisor, leader, and collaborator, Rohit applies problem resolution, analytical, and operational skills to all initiatives and develops strategic requirements and solution analysis through all stages of the project life cycle and product readiness to execution.
Rohit excels in designing scalable cloud microservice architectures using Spring Boot and Netflix OSS technologies using AWS and Google clouds. As a Security Ninja, Rohit looks for ways to resolve application security vulnerabilities using ethical hacking and threat modeling. Rohit is excited about architecting cloud technologies using Dockers, REDIS, NGINX, RightScale, RabbitMQ, Apigee, Azul Zing, Actuate BIRT reporting, Chef, Splunk, Rest-Assured, SoapUI, Dynatrace, and EnterpriseDB. In addition, Rohit has developed lambda architecture solutions using Apache Spark, Cassandra, and Camel for real-time analytics and integration projects.
Rohit has done MBA from Babson College in Corporate Entrepreneurship, Masters in Computer Science from Boston University and Harvard University. Rohit is a regular speaker at No Fluff Just Stuff, UberConf, RichWeb, GIDS, and other international conferences.
Rohit loves to connect on http://www.productivecloudinnovation.com.
http://linkedin.com/in/rohit-bhardwaj-cloud or using Twitter at rbhardwaj1.