System Design interview questions

Showing 601–630 of 1311 results

• Design a Scalable Error Message Counting ServiceMedium

  Design a service that receives application error messages and reports how often each distinct error occurs over time. It tests grouping varied messages into error signatures, absorbing bursty write traffic during incidents, time-windowed aggregation, top-error queries and count accuracy under failures.

  LinkedInSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Top-K Ranking ServiceEasy

  This question tests the ability to design a distributed, low-latency system capable of maintaining and serving a real-time 'Top-K' list of items (e.g., trending hashtags) across a massive stream of incoming data.

  LinkedInSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Top-K search words serviceMedium

  The question evaluates understanding of scalable, low-latency analytics and search-event systems, including high-throughput event ingestion, Top-K aggregation across all-time and sliding windows, normalization/deduplication trade-offs, and multi-region consistency considerations.

  LinkedInSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a company-wide monitoring systemMedium

  This question evaluates skills in designing large-scale observability and monitoring systems, covering telemetry collection (metrics, logs, traces), high-throughput ingestion, storage and scaling strategies, alerting pipelines, and operational trade-offs like cardinality, retention, and backpressure.

  LinkedInSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a distributed key-value storeHard

  Design a distributed key-value store 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.

  LinkedInMachine Learning EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a malicious-URL checking service using an isMalicious APIMedium

  This question tests your ability to design a high-throughput, low-latency URL reputation checking service, focusing on caching strategies, scalability, and system resilience.

  LinkedInSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a metrics platform without alertingMedium

  This problem tests your ability to design a high-throughput time-series metrics system, focusing on ingestion pipelines, efficient storage schema for multi-dimensional data, and query performance.

  LinkedInSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a scalable calendar systemHard

  This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design a scalable, multi-tenant calendar platform, testing competencies in distributed systems architecture, API and data-model design for events/recurrence/time zones, access control and privacy boundaries, notification pipelines, and external integration.

  LinkedInSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a scalable key-value storeMedium

  This system design question evaluates expertise in distributed systems and scalable storage architecture within the System Design domain, focusing on data partitioning, replication, durability, consistency models, and low-latency operation.

  LinkedInSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design an exception monitoring system with top‑KMedium

  This question tests the ability to design a high-throughput distributed system capable of ingesting, deduplicating, and aggregating exception logs to provide real-time top-K statistics.

  LinkedInSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design an in-memory key-value store using mapsMedium

  This question evaluates skills in in-memory data modeling, concurrent access control, time-complexity reasoning for expected O(1) operations, and storage engine considerations such as durability, compaction, and TTL when restricting indexing to map/dictionary primitives.

  LinkedInSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design distributed parallel job processingHard

  This question evaluates understanding of distributed systems architecture, parallel job scheduling, fault tolerance, coordination and concurrency control, API and data model design, idempotency, observability, and capacity planning for multi-tenant, heterogeneous workloads.

  LinkedInSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design scalable job scheduler and query dashboardMedium

  This question evaluates a candidate's system design skills in building a scalable, fault-tolerant job scheduling system and efficient near-real-time time-window querying, focusing on distributed scheduling, storage and indexing strategies, partitioning, and reliability guarantees, and is commonly asked to probe trade-offs among scalability, latency, availability, and consistency. Belonging to the System Design domain, it examines both high-level architectural thinking and practical application-level considerations such as data modeling, query/index design, operational concerns like hot partitions, and horizontal scaling.

  LinkedInSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Explain database transactions and ACIDMedium

  This question evaluates a candidate's understanding of database transactions including ACID properties, isolation levels (read uncommitted, read committed, repeatable read, serializable), common anomalies (dirty reads, non-repeatable reads, phantom reads), MVCC, and commit/rollback semantics, testing competency in transactional correctness and concurrency control. Commonly asked in System Design and database contexts because it probes reasoning about data integrity, visibility, and durability under concurrent workloads, and it tests both conceptual understanding of transactional guarantees and practical application of isolation behavior in relational database systems.

  LinkedInSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Reduce Stale Listings in a Job MarketplaceHard

  Design an auditable staleness-detection and remediation engine for a global job marketplace that aggregates heterogeneous signals, enforces graduated interventions, and supports low-latency employer appeals.

  LinkedInSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Review a Web Application ArchitectureEasy

  This question evaluates system design competencies such as scalability, reliability, fault tolerance, database architecture, load balancing, external dependency management, and observability, and is categorized under System Design.

  LinkedInSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Scale a NoSQL Key–Value Store to One Million QPSMedium

  Design a distributed, highly available NoSQL key-value store capable of serving 1M QPS across 50 million key-value pairs with low p99 latency.

  LinkedInSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Explain cloud computing fundamentalsHard

  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 Explain cloud computing fundamentals states assumptions, handles edge cases, explains trade-offs, and shows how to validate the result clearly.

  Lowe'sSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Build Collaborative Document Editing Shared by People and AI AgentsMedium

  A take-home asks you to build collaborative document editing in which people and AI agents edit the same document, then defend its scaling limits and add approval, audit history and selective revert for agent edits. Tests concurrency control, real-time sync, anchoring slow agent edits, attribution, and prototype scoping.

  Luma AISoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Build a Scalable Text-to-Speech Service Prototype, Then Defend and Extend ItMedium

  An 8 to 12 hour take-home asks you to build a scalable text-to-speech service with AI coding agents, then defend its trade-offs and scaling limits in a product review and plan a new customer requirement. Tests 0-to-1 scoping, streaming and batch synthesis design, capacity reasoning, and estimation and roadmap skills.

  Luma AISoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design One-to-One Messaging Across Multiple DevicesMedium

  Tests the ability to architect a real-time, one-to-one messaging system supporting multi-device synchronization, push notifications, idempotent message delivery, and reliable cursor-based history pagination.

  LyftSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Distributed Web CrawlerMedium

  Design a distributed web crawler that starts from seed URLs and scales across roughly 1,000 heterogeneous worker devices. The question covers canonical URL identity and crawl scope, a durable partitioned frontier with atomic deduplication, host-level politeness and robots handling, lease-based coordination with at-least-once delivery and idempotent effects, fetch/parse/storage schemas, near-duplicate detection, recrawl and backpressure, capacity estimation, safety controls, and the enqueue/status/results API. A common Lyft software engineer onsite system design question testing distributed-systems judgment, correctness under retries, and operational thinking.

  LyftSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Donation PlatformHard

  A Lyft onsite system design question: design an online donation platform that processes one-time and recurring donations through an external payment provider while guaranteeing no lost, duplicated, or wrong-amount charges. It tests payment-flow correctness, idempotency, append-only ledgers, reconciliation, data modeling, consistency tradeoffs, and scaling for donation spikes.

  LyftSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Fault-Tolerant Wikipedia ArchiverEasy

  Design a fault-tolerant system that archives Wikipedia and keeps versioned content current using one reliable coordinator, many unreliable untrusted workers, and durable blob storage. Cover policy-aware discovery, large-frontier deduplication, task assignment, result validation, safe publication, failure recovery, and recrawling.

  LyftSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a One-to-One Chat ServiceMedium

  Design a durable one-to-one chat service with conversation ordering, idempotent sends, offline replay, and secure multi-device delivery.

  LyftSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Wiki Crawler That Keeps Every Stored Page at Most Five Days StaleMedium

  A system design question about crawling and storing all the content of a wiki while keeping every stored page no more than five days stale. It tests capacity estimates, the crawl frontier and scheduling, change detection, storage of page versions, politeness limits, failure recovery, and monitoring of freshness.

  LyftSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a scalable real-time chat systemHard

  This question evaluates skills in designing scalable real-time distributed systems, covering API design, message ordering and idempotency, fan-out strategies, storage tiers, indexing, sharding and replication, consistency vs.

  LyftSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design web crawler for 1000 devicesHard

  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 web crawler for 1000 devices states assumptions, handles edge cases, explains trade-offs, and shows how to validate the result clearly.

  LyftSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Scalable Product Authentication PlatformMedium

  Design authentication infrastructure for browser and API clients using email and password today with room for external identity providers later. Cover secure credentials, session lifecycle, abuse resistance, recovery, database choices, trust boundaries, and a path to tenfold traffic.

  MathWorksSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a multi-tenant course purchase and delivery systemMedium

  This question tests the ability to design a scalable multi-tenant architecture that manages course content, user entitlements, and purchase workflows across different organizational silos.

  MathWorksSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnline Assessment