How to Design a Scalable HRMS Architecture?

From what I view, storing 5000+ employees is not a big deal for any modern software system, especially given the fact that it will be operated by a couple HRs.

For that reason, I'd suggest sticking to a modular monolith as microservices are notorious for their overhead connected to inter-process over-the-wire communication, such as the need in distributed tracing and mitigating network latency and microservice failures.

I believe that the modest figures you mentioned are the reason why there are no mock system design interviews aimed specifically at HRMS, as in such a case, the simplest solution will be the best. Yet you may have a look at such interviews in other domains to see how people approach functional and non-functional requirements and ask these questions about your system.

In case you'll encounter a scalability bottleneck in the future, you might consider extracting those parts into microservices, which is fine as long as those microservices are built around business capabilities, not the entities.

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Bohdan Stupak6mo ago
From what I view, storing 5000+ employees is not a big deal for any modern software system, especially given the fact that it will be operated by a couple HRs.
For that reason, I'd suggest sticking to a modular monolith as microservices are notorious for their overhead connected to inter-process over-the-wire communication, such as the need in distributed tracing and mitigating network latency and microservice failures.
I believe that the modest figures you mentioned are the reason why there are no mock system design interviews aimed specifically at HRMS, as in such a case, the simplest solution will be the best. Yet you may have a look at such interviews in other domains to see how people approach functional and non-functional requirements and ask these questions about your system.
In case you'll encounter a scalability bottleneck in the future, you might consider extracting those parts into microservices, which is fine as long as those microservices are built around business capabilities, not the entities.