I built a Staff Engineer Academy

I built a Staff Engineer Academy

I've been collecting system design notes, frontend architecture concepts, distributed-systems patterns, and AI engineering resources for a while.

The problem?

There is no shortage of information.

The harder part is turning all that information into Staff-level thinking.

So I built something for that.

🚀 Staff Engineer Academy

👉 https://frontend-system-design-academy-v5.pages.dev/

Source code:

👉 https://github.com/deepeshk1204/staff-engineer-academy

What's inside?

The academy currently covers 52 topics across three tracks.

🖥️ Frontend Systems

Browser fundamentals → large-scale frontend architecture:

• Browser rendering
• HTTP/2 & HTTP/3
• CDN & Edge
• Caching
• CSR / SSR / SSG / ISR
• BFFs
• React at scale
• Micro-frontends
• Module Federation
• Design Systems
• WebSockets & realtime
• Offline-first
• CRDTs
• Performance
• Security
• Observability
• Deployment & migrations

⚙️ Backend & Distributed Systems

• API design
• Databases & indexes
• Transactions
• Data modelling
• Redis
• Sharding
• Replication & consistency
• Distributed locks
• Queues & event streaming
• CQRS & Sagas
• Capacity planning
• Resilience
• Rate limiting
• Multi-tenancy
• SLOs
• Kubernetes
• Security

🤖 AI Engineering

• LLM fundamentals
• Structured output
• Embeddings
• Vector search
• RAG
• Advanced retrieval
• Context engineering
• Tool calling
• Agents
• Evaluation
• AI observability
• Inference serving
• Model routing
• Cost optimization
• Fine-tuning
• AI security
• AI product UX
• AI platform architecture

But it's not just a collection of notes

This is the part I care about most.

The goal is to move from:

Read → Forget

to:

Understand → Explain → Practice → Recall → Simulate

Instead of simply reading:

What is a CDN?

you should be able to answer:

How would you design the CDN strategy for a global application? What would you cache? What would you avoid caching? What trade-offs would you make?

The academy currently includes:

• 101 practice drills
• 463 flashcards
• Staff-level spoken-answer guidance
• Failure & trade-off tables
• Timed system-design mocks
• A scoring rubric
• A 12-week learning loop

Why build this?

I think system design gets easier when you stop trying to memorize architectures and start asking better questions:

Why this design?

What breaks?

What happens at 10× scale?

What changes when latency, cost, consistency, or reliability becomes the constraint?

That's the mindset I'm trying to build into the Academy.

It's free, requires no account, and progress stays in your browser.

I'm building it in public and will keep expanding it.

If you're preparing for Senior → Staff, working on frontend architecture, learning distributed systems, or exploring AI systems, give it a try.

👉 Staff Engineer Academy

https://deepeshk1204.github.io/staff-engineer-academy/

I'd love feedback on what is missing, what is unclear, and which system-design problems should be added next.

Systems over syntax.

Trade-offs over buzzwords.