System Design interview questions

Showing 451–480 of 1311 results

• Design and operate a monolith on KubernetesHard

  This question evaluates a candidate's competency in designing and operating a monolithic application on Kubernetes, covering platform engineering topics such as deployment topology, networking and traffic management, CI/CD and rollout strategies, resource management and autoscaling, stateful dependencies, observability, incident response, and disaster recovery. Commonly asked in System Design interviews to assess practical application of distributed systems and SRE principles—specifically the ability to reason about operational trade-offs, reliability, and incremental migration paths—this prompt sits in the System Design domain and emphasizes practical application with architectural reasoning rather than purely conceptual understanding.

  FigmaSoftware EngineerSystem DesignHR Screen
• Build a Firmware Data Quality and Release-Feedback FrameworkMedium

  This question tests the ability to design an end-to-end data pipeline architecture that ensures high-fidelity telemetry collection, automated quality validation, and safe release orchestration for embedded firmware devices.

  FigureaiData EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a Telemetry Platform Ingesting Two Gigabytes per SecondMedium

  This question tests your ability to design a high-throughput, fault-tolerant telemetry ingestion pipeline capable of handling high-velocity data streams from distributed robotic systems.

  FigureaiData EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a Simplified WhatsApp: Message Send and Receive, Schema, and ScalingEasy

  Design a simplified WhatsApp focused on sending and receiving messages: the online and offline delivery flow, client APIs, the database schema, and scaling. It tests connection routing, delivery guarantees and ordering, and a choice between relational and NoSQL storage justified by access patterns.

  FivetranSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design Container Assignment with Incompatible GoodsHard

  Design a shipment-planning and container-packing service that assigns cargo items to ocean containers subject to physical dimensions, weight limits, and hazardous/incompatibility rules while supporting async workflows and plan approvals.

  FlexportSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design 64-bit distributed IDs and a parking lotEasy

  The question evaluates distributed-systems and scalability competencies for globally unique 64-bit ID generation (including sharding, time-ordering, fault tolerance and clock issues) as well as object-oriented design, concurrency control, API design, and data modeling for a parking lot backend.

  FlipsterSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a Distributed Job Scheduler for One-Off and Recurring JobsMedium

  A system design question asking you to design a distributed job scheduler that runs jobs immediately, at a set time or on a recurring cron schedule across a pool of workers. It tests how you find due jobs at scale, prevent duplicate runs, recover from worker failures, and handle retries, bursts and missed runs.

  FluidstackSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a Fair GPU Training Job PlatformEasy

  Design a centralized scheduling and execution platform for one-off ML training jobs across a shared, heterogeneous GPU cluster, balancing fair resource sharing, multi-GPU network topology, and fault tolerance.

  FluidstackSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design Caching for a Hotel Booking SystemEasy

  Design a high-throughput caching and inventory architecture for a hotel booking platform that accelerates read-heavy search traffic while strictly preventing overselling through temporary holds and authoritative consistency.

  Fora TravelSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design Emergency Notification SystemMedium

  This question evaluates system design and engineering competencies related to large-scale, real-time notification systems, including distributed systems architecture, messaging and delivery mechanisms, data modeling, API design, scalability, reliability, security, and monitoring.

  Fora TravelSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design Radius-Based Notifications from Mobile LocationsMedium

  Tests the ability to design an end-to-end location ingestion and geo-fenced notification system, focusing on spatial indexing, staleness filtering, scalable fan-out, and hotspot mitigation.

  Fora TravelSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a Hierarchical Learning Content APIEasy

  Design a relational schema and REST API for a three-tiered learning curriculum (Tracks, Modules, Lessons) supporting drag-and-drop reordering, transactional updates, and versioned caching.

  Fora TravelSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design EV Telemetry Monitoring AppMedium

  This question evaluates skills in designing real-time telemetry systems, including vehicle data collection and transmission, backend ingestion and validation, API and frontend design, operational controls for per-vehicle data flow, and the incorporation of AI-assisted development into the engineering process.

  FordSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a Fitness Activity Tracking App with Followers and LeaderboardsMedium

  Prepare for a Fuse Energy system design interview about design a fitness activity tracking app with followers and leaderboards. This question focuses on requirements, architecture, trade-offs, reliability, and follow-up discussion areas.

  Fuse EnergySoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Concurrent Appointment Booking SystemMedium

  Design a concurrent healthcare appointment scheduling system that prevents double booking, supports fast availability searches, and ensures reliable notifications and state auditability.

  Garner HealthSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a Doctor Appointment Booking System for Sudden DemandMedium

  Design a doctor appointment system with searchable availability, atomic booking, cancellation, and protection against double booking. The follow-up examines a vaccine-demand spike through waiting-room admission, fairness, throttling, hot-slot partitioning, caching, autoscaling, load shedding, and reconciliation.

  Garner HealthSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Choose Between a Monolith, Microservices, and a Modular ArchitectureMedium

  Compare monolithic and service-based architectures and plan incremental extraction or consolidation around domain boundaries, data ownership, and measured goals.

  GeneralmotorsSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Meet a 10-second latency and 99% availability target across 3-5 dependent servicesMedium

  An open-ended design discussion about an application that calls three to five dependent services and must keep latency under 10 seconds and availability at 99% or better. It tests objective definitions, availability and tail-latency math, timeouts, retries, fallbacks, and adapting as requirements change.

  GeneralmotorsSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design Real-Time Typeahead for Enterprise Search: History, People, Docs, Apps, FiltersMedium

  Design real-time typeahead for an enterprise search product that suggests past searches, people, documents, apps and filters as the user types. Tests client request policy and stale-response handling, accessible combobox UI, permission-aware backend fan-out, blending across sources and latency budgets.

  GleanFrontend EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Pastebin Service: Requirements, Entities, APIs and End-to-End ArchitectureEasy

  Design a scalable text sharing (Pastebin) service that generates unique short URLs for submitted text snippets. This question assesses API design, data modeling, storage decoupling, key generation strategies, and caching mechanisms under high read concurrency.

  Goldman SachsSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Streaming Metrics Dashboard: Time-Range Queries and Event-Time WatermarksMedium

  Design the backend of a dashboard that shows metrics computed from a continuous event stream and lets users query any time range. The discussion focuses on answering range queries from pre-aggregated data and on how watermarks decide when event-time windows are complete despite late or out-of-order events.

  Goldman SachsSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Ten-Minute In-Memory Notification Deduplication EngineMedium

  Design a high-throughput, low-latency in-memory deduplication service that identifies and suppresses duplicate notifications within a 10-minute sliding window.

  Goldman SachsSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Service That Captures Zoom Meeting Recordings and Processes Them at ScaleMedium

  A system design exercise for ingesting recorded Zoom meetings into a business product and processing them into transcripts and conversation analysis. It tests reliable ingestion despite missed notifications, rate-limited fetching, staged idempotent processing on costly compute, fairness between customers, reprocessing, and data deletion.

  GongSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOther
• Design a Service That Finds Common Free Time Across Connected CalendarsMedium

  A system design exercise for a service that finds times when a group of people is free, using calendars synced from external providers. It tests computing common free time correctly across time zones, keeping availability fresh within rate limits, preventing double bookings, and scaling queries and public booking pages.

  GongSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOther
• Design A Drive-Style Usage Quota LimiterMedium

  Design a distributed storage quota accounting and enforcement service for a cloud drive platform that handles concurrent multi-part uploads, deletions, retries, and usage drift reconciliation.

  GoogleSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design Calendar Event Conflict HandlingMedium

  This question evaluates a candidate's competence in designing scalable calendar event and conflict-handling systems, focusing on data modeling, time semantics (time zones and recurrence), concurrency control, and distributed-system trade-offs, and falls under the System Design domain.

  GoogleSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design LLM Summarization of E-commerce Reviews with Prompt-Injection and PII DefensesMedium

  A system design question about an e-commerce platform that ingests customer reviews and uses an LLM to summarize them for an internal dashboard. It probes the ingestion and summarization pipeline, trust and safety filtering, data sanitization and PII redaction, and defenses against prompt injection hidden in review text.

  GoogleSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Billing-Token Rate Limiter for AI AgentsMedium

  Design a distributed rate limiter and quota enforcement service tailored for AI agent workloads where consumption is measured in variable billing tokens rather than fixed request counts.

  GoogleSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a CI system that runs one million tests in ten minutesMedium

  Design a continuous integration system that builds a change and runs about one million tests within a ten-minute budget. Tests capacity estimation, sharding and scheduling by test duration, artifact distribution, caching and test selection, flaky tests, failure handling, and cost versus latency trade-offs.

  GoogleSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Collaborative Notes ServiceHard

  Design a collaborative notes backend with CRUD, WebSocket editing, operation logs, snapshots, CRDT or Operational Transformation conflict handling, offline sync, note-based scaling, permissions, and recovery.

  GoogleSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite