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Design a rate limiter

OracleSoftware Engineer · Onsite
MediumSoftware EngineerOnsiteSystem Design

Last updated

This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design scalable, correct distributed rate limiting mechanisms, testing competencies in distributed systems, concurrency control, API gateway behavior, observability, and configurability within the System Design domain.

Design a rate limiting system for an API gateway.

Your design should address:

  • Rate limits such as "N requests per second/minute" per key (e.g., per user, per IP, per API token).
  • Correctness under concurrency and bursty traffic.
  • Operation in a distributed, multi-instance gateway.
  • What happens on limit exceed (HTTP status, headers, retry guidance).
  • Observability and configurability (different limits per endpoint/customer tier).