System Design interview questions

Showing 271–300 of 1311 results

• Evaluate credit-limit increase profitabilityMedium

  This question evaluates a data engineer's competency in business analytics, unit-economics P&L modeling, risk-versus-revenue trade-off analysis, and experiment-driven evaluation of credit product changes.

  Capital OneData EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Validate virtual credit card transactions from encoded IDsMedium

  This question evaluates understanding of virtual credit card product trade-offs and the ability to design data models and deterministic validation logic for encoded transaction attributes, testing competencies in payment systems, data encoding/decoding, and rule-based validation.

  Capital OneMachine Learning EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design an Attendance Payroll ServiceEasy

  This question evaluates system design and backend engineering skills, including API design, data modeling for time-series attendance, payroll computation logic, consistency guarantees, integration/synchronization with external sources, and strategies for handling high-volume, bursty traffic.

  CarvanaSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Multi-Channel Message QueueHard

  This question evaluates understanding of data modeling for multi-tag messages, set-based subscription semantics, scalable system design, and algorithmic complexity for operations such as enqueue, dequeue, subscribe/unsubscribe, and intersection queries.

  CerebrasSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Generate Consistent Outputs for Similar InputsMedium

  Design a semantic caching and computation deduplication system that identifies similar inputs, prevents duplicate expensive processing under concurrent load, and maintains consistent, versioned outputs.

  Charta HealthSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Pre-Trade Risk Check for an Electronic Order PathMedium

  This question tests the ability to design a high-throughput, low-latency risk engine capable of atomic exposure validation before orders reach an exchange, while balancing concurrency and strict fault tolerance.

  Chicago Trading CompanySoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design load balancing, caching, and idempotent APIsEasy

  This question evaluates a candidate's competency in designing scalable, reliable backend architectures, specifically focusing on load balancing strategies, multi-layer caching, and idempotent API design.

  ChimeSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design mobile check deposit systemHard

  This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design end-to-end, production-grade mobile check deposit systems, assessing competencies in system architecture, distributed systems, security and fraud prevention, regulatory compliance (Reg CC, Check 21), data durability, and operational observability.

  ChimeSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design banking payment scheduling systemHard

  This interview question evaluates requirements, scale assumptions, API/data design, architecture, trade-offs, failure modes, and rollout in a realistic interview setting. A strong answer for Design banking payment scheduling system states assumptions, handles edge cases, explains trade-offs, and shows how to validate the result clearly.

  CircleSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnline Assessment
• Design flight-price search serviceHard

  Design flight-price search service evaluates requirements, scale assumptions, API/data design, architecture, trade-offs, failure modes, and rollout in a realistic interview setting. A strong answer states assumptions, handles edge cases, explains trade-offs, and shows how to validate the result clearly.

  CircleSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnline Assessment
• Design in-memory DB with TTL and backupHard

  A Circle software-engineer take-home: design a versioned in-memory key→(field→value) database with per-field TTL, append-only history and delete tombstones, lexicographically ordered scan and scanPrefix (correct even with special characters), and snapshot backup/restore counters. It exercises data modeling, time-travel visibility semantics, ordered indexing, garbage collection, and per-operation complexity trade-offs.

  CircleSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnline Assessment
• Trace and reduce redundant curl requestsMedium

  A practical curl interview question on tracing and reducing redundant HTTP requests: instrumenting a curl-based client, finding duplicate calls, and cutting request volume. Includes a full worked solution.

  CircleSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnline Assessment
• Design Inventory Availability and Order PlacementMedium

  Design e-commerce inventory availability and order reservation without overselling under concurrent requests. Define on-hand, reserved, and available invariants; atomic multi-item placement; idempotent retries; expiration; and optimistic versus pessimistic control for hot SKUs.

  CitadelSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a Course Registration SystemMedium

  Design a course registration system with relational models and APIs for enrollment, dropping, schedules, waitlists, and course browsing. The solution explains transactional capacity protection, idempotent retries, re-enrollment without duplicate rows, FIFO promotion, outbox notifications, and tests for final-seat races.

  CitadelSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Low-Latency Metrics and Alerting PlatformMedium

  Design a high-throughput, multi-tenant metrics ingestion and alerting engine capable of triggering critical alerts within two seconds. The question evaluates your knowledge of streaming architectures, time-series storage, cardinality management, and fault-tolerant notification delivery.

  CitadelSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a low-latency trading platformHard

  This question tests the ability to architect a high-throughput, sub-millisecond trading system while balancing strict deterministic latency requirements with necessary safety checks.

  CitadelSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a low-latency trading systemHard

  This question evaluates expertise in designing low-latency, high-determinism electronic trading systems, covering order matching, market data ingestion and publish, partitioning/sharding, persistence for auditability, idempotency, pre-trade risk controls, and operational reliability.

  CitadelSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design alerting for application-to-exchange mappingsMedium

  This question evaluates understanding of real-time stream processing, alerting policy design, and distributed state coordination for application-to-exchange mappings, testing competencies in scalability, correctness under partitioning and duplication, and efficient aggregation of high-volume event streams.

  CitadelSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design an Authenticated Online Shopping ServiceMedium

  Design an authenticated online shopping service with secure signup and login, user-owned carts, product browsing, and retry-safe order creation. The solution covers password hashing, session rotation, CSRF defenses, resource-level authorization, idempotency keys, immutable order snapshots, recovery tokens, and horizontal-access tests.

  CitadelSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Discuss queues, NoSQL, and concurrencyHard

  This question evaluates understanding of distributed messaging systems, delivery semantics, push versus pull consumption models, NoSQL versus relational storage trade-offs, and concurrency control including deadlock concepts.

  CitadelSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Explain OS and networking basicsMedium

  This question evaluates a candidate's understanding of operating system and networking fundamentals, covering processes, threads and context switching, concurrency versus parallelism, TCP/UDP and flow versus congestion control, and the end-to-end web request and browser rendering pipeline.

  CitiSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design weekly comment digestMedium

  This question evaluates understanding of scalable system architecture, integration with external ML services, handling rate limits, reliable scheduling and delivery, data modeling for aggregation and deduplication, and fault-tolerant ranking under load.

  ClickupSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design real-time kitchen order fulfillment systemMedium

  This question evaluates a candidate's competency in designing real-time backend systems, emphasizing concurrency control, stateful resource allocation, time-sensitive freshness constraints, efficient eviction policies, and action logging.

  CloudKitchensSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design an encrypted log collection systemMedium

  This question tests the ability to design a distributed, high-throughput ingestion pipeline that ensures log confidentiality and integrity using encryption at rest and in transit.

  CloudflareSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Present and Defend an End-to-End Project You Owned: Architecture, Choices, ChallengesMedium

  A choose-your-own system design round: present a core project you owned end to end at a previous job, then defend its architecture, technology choices and hardest challenges under detailed probing. Tests depth of ownership, trade-off reasoning and the ability to move from a diagram to concrete mechanisms.

  Cockroach LabsSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Answer Enterprise Questions Across Internal and External SourcesMedium

  Design enterprise AI question answering across internal and external sources with permission-aware retrieval, entity mapping, evidence-grounded synthesis, and freshness controls.

  CohereSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design Real-Time Comments with Optimistic UpdatesMedium

  Design optimistic real-time comments with temporary identities, idempotent posting, response/event reconciliation, visible failure states, and durable history.

  CohereFrontend EngineerSystem DesignOther
• Design a Real-Time Comment System Front End With Optimistic UpdatesMedium

  Front-end system design for a real-time comment feed, centered on optimistic updates: a new comment is appended to the list before the backend confirms it, so the user can keep typing. It tests client state modeling, reconciliation with live echoes, failure and retry handling, ordering, reconnection and rendering performance.

  CohereFrontend EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design Crypto Order RoutingHard

  This question evaluates a candidate's ability to architect distributed, low-latency, and fault-tolerant order-placement and routing systems for cryptocurrency trading, covering consistency guarantees, external integration with heterogeneous venue protocols, fund reservation, execution reconciliation, and auditability.

  CoinbaseSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design Frontend Architecture for Trading UIHard

  This question evaluates competency in frontend architecture for real-time trading UIs, covering state management, rendering strategies, real-time data flow, performance, reliability, security, testing, and observability.

  CoinbaseFrontend EngineerSystem DesignOnsite