Prioritize rooms for allocation

HardSoftware Engineer Onsite System Design

Last updated October 28, 2026

This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design a real-time room allocation and ranking service in the System Design domain, testing competencies in architectural design, ranking and scoring functions, data sourcing and freshness, fairness mechanisms, and online evaluation and experimentation.

Design a room allocation service that, given a meeting request (time window, duration, capacity, equipment, location), returns a ranked list of rooms. Propose a scoring function integrating factors such as historical room usage counts, expected idle-time fragmentation, attendee walking distance, equipment match, past no-show rates, and fairness across teams. Describe data sources and freshness, how weights are tuned (rules vs learned model), safeguards against starvation, online/offline evaluation, and an A/B testing plan.