System Design interview questions

Showing 61–90 of 1311 results

• Design a Scalable Metrics Monitoring SystemMedium

  Design a high-throughput time-series metrics monitoring and alerting platform similar to Amazon CloudWatch, focusing on series identity, cardinality controls, and low-latency aggregations.

  AmazonSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Scalable News FeedEasy

  This problem evaluates your ability to design a feed generation architecture, specifically comparing push vs. pull models for users with varying follower counts.

  AmazonSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a Scalable and Polite Web CrawlerMedium

  This question tests the ability to design a distributed, fault-tolerant system that balances high-throughput data collection with ethical crawling constraints and resource efficiency.

  AmazonSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a URL shortening platformHard

  This question evaluates competency in system design and distributed systems architecture, including API design, scalable short-code generation, data modeling and storage/sharding, caching and CDN strategies, consistency and fault-tolerance trade-offs, rate limiting and abuse prevention, analytics, compliance, and capacity planning.

  AmazonSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a cloud database write path and recoveryHard

  This question tests the ability to architect a distributed database write path that decouples compute from storage, specifically focusing on how to maintain ACID properties during failures.

  AmazonSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a configuration subscription serviceHard

  This question evaluates skills in designing a distributed configuration and subscription service, covering API design, real-time notification semantics (delivery and ordering guarantees), versioning, concurrency and thread-safety, durability and recovery, multi-tenant isolation, security, and scalability concerns.

  AmazonSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a distributed job scheduler serviceHard

  This question tests the ability to design a distributed, fault-tolerant system capable of scheduling and executing tasks at a massive scale with strict latency requirements.

  AmazonSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a file search module like UNIX findHard

  This question evaluates object-oriented and API design skills, filesystem semantics (pattern matching, file types, timestamps, permissions, symlink handling), traversal and concurrency strategies, and robustness for large or error-prone directory trees.

  AmazonSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a keyboard and mouse input systemHard

  An Amazon software-engineer system-design screen: design a system that captures keyboard and mouse events and reconstructs exactly what the user typed. It tests low-latency event capture, total ordering across multiple devices, IME/composition and grapheme-safe text reconstruction, mouse selection and clipboard/undo-redo, plus durable persistence with deterministic crash-safe replay.

  AmazonSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a large-scale temperature sensor systemMedium

  This question tests your ability to design a high-throughput data ingestion pipeline and storage architecture for a fleet of IoT sensors, focusing on write-heavy scalability and time-series query performance.

  AmazonSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a log filtering and analytics serviceHard

  An Amazon software engineer system design question: design a log filtering and analytics service that ingests high-volume application logs and supports attribute/substring filtering, error counts over a time window, and hourly histograms by pattern or ID. It tests ingestion API design, dual search + OLAP storage with hourly rollups, schema and indexing, late/duplicate-event handling, partitioning and retention, and correctness-vs-latency trade-offs with complexity analysis.

  AmazonSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a memory usage switcher with thresholdsHard

  This question evaluates system design and operational engineering skills in process memory management, runtime configurability, observability, and reliability, and belongs to the System Design domain; it primarily tests practical application with system-level conceptual reasoning.

  AmazonSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a multi-size storage locker systemMedium

  This question tests your ability to design a scalable, distributed reservation system that handles resource allocation (bin packing) under concurrency constraints.

  AmazonSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a package installer with dependenciesMedium

  This question tests your ability to design a system that manages complex dependency graphs, ensuring package integrity, version compatibility, and atomic installation operations.

  AmazonSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a scalable image-based social networkMedium

  This question tests your ability to design a distributed system architecture capable of handling high-volume image uploads, metadata storage, and low-latency feed retrieval.

  AmazonSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a scalable parking lot systemHard

  Design a scalable parking lot system 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.

  AmazonSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design an AI Fraud-Triage Agent Over a 1 TB/Day Payments Event StreamMedium

  Design a service where an AI agent investigates flagged payment events inside a stream running at roughly 1 TB of events per day, covering capacity math, where the agent sits relative to deterministic detection, and the cost and adversarial-input guardrails that keep it from becoming a liability.

  AmazonSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design an Amazon Locker ServiceEasy

  Tests object-oriented design and state-machine modeling for a self-service package locker station, focusing on parcel allocation, code expiration, and physical-vs-logical state consistency.

  AmazonSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design an S3-like object storage serviceMedium

  This question evaluates understanding of distributed systems, object storage architecture, REST API design, multipart upload semantics, replication and durability strategies, failure recovery, and scalability concerns.

  AmazonApplied ScientistSystem DesignOnsite
• Design an extensible ticketing systemHard

  This question evaluates software architecture and system-design competencies, covering extensibility patterns, concurrency control for high-throughput ticketing, transactional and idempotency guarantees, persistence/schema modeling, API design, and pluggable pricing strategies.

  AmazonSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design an intersection traffic-light systemHard

  This question evaluates system design competency across real-time control and safety-critical logic, API and data modeling, sensor/actuator integration, and operational scalability for traffic-signal controllers.

  AmazonSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design an online bookstore for browse and purchaseHard

  Design an online bookstore for browse and purchase 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.

  AmazonSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design delayed job scheduler (LLD)Hard

  This question evaluates system design and distributed-systems competencies, including scheduling algorithms, durable persistence and recovery, concurrency control, delivery semantics, and operational concerns, and it belongs to the System Design category.

  AmazonSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design document-tag classes with concurrency safetyHard

  Design document-tag classes with concurrency safety 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.

  AmazonSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design globally consistent metadata serviceMedium

  This question tests the ability to design a globally distributed metadata service that requires strict consistency for frequent read/write operations across multiple geographic regions.

  AmazonSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design in-memory threshold switcherHard

  This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design memory-aware control systems, covering skills such as hysteresis-based thresholding, dynamic runtime reconfiguration, thread-safe concurrency, low-overhead metric sampling, event-driven state notifications, and handling multi-process and failure edge cases.

  AmazonSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design locker allocation serviceHard

  This question evaluates a candidate's understanding of stateful system design, resource allocation strategies, concurrency control, API and data modeling, and fault tolerance in the context of real-time locker assignment.

  AmazonSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design multi-tenant ingestion and processing platformMedium

  This question tests the ability to design a multi-tenant data platform that ensures resource fairness, performance isolation, and cost attribution at scale.

  AmazonSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design pickup point planning for ride-hailingMedium

  Design a ride-hailing pickup-point planning system. Covers map snapping, candidate generation, driver and passenger routing, safety filtering, scoring objectives, app presentation, architecture, historical learning, and A/B metrics.

  AmazonSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design real-time top-K products serviceHard

  An Amazon software-engineer system-design screen: design a real-time service that ingests a stream of purchase events (customer_id, item_id, timestamp) and continuously serves the top-K most purchased items over multiple rolling windows (e.g. last 5 minutes, last 1 hour, 24 hours, and daily totals). The answer covers ingestion and partitioning, event-time windowing with watermarks, exact min-heap vs. approximate Count-Min-Sketch / Space-Saving top-K, late/duplicate/out-of-order handling, state and TTL, exactly-once fault tolerance, horizontal scaling, serving APIs, and latency-vs-accuracy trade-offs.

  AmazonSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen