System Design interview questions

Showing 91–120 of 1311 results

• Design ride-hailing pricing with fairness and poolingHard

  This question evaluates system design and algorithmic skills related to real-time distributed pricing, API and data-flow architecture, carpooling logic, fairness constraints, and experimentation support.

  AmazonSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design secure multi-tier cloud infrastructureHard

  This question evaluates cloud systems design competencies including multi-tier network architecture, IP addressing and capacity planning, security controls, centralized server management, shared storage trade-offs, and identity and access integration within a production-scale virtual private cloud.

  AmazonSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• High Availability and Failover for a Primary-Replica DatabaseMedium

  This problem tests your ability to design a resilient database architecture that minimizes downtime and data loss during node failures.

  AmazonSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Measure platform success and drive adoptionMedium

  This question assesses your ability to design a telemetry and feedback system for an internal developer platform to measure adoption, identify friction points, and drive cross-team migration.

  AmazonSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Review an existing architecture for risksMedium

  This question tests the ability to analyze a distributed system architecture for single points of failure, scalability bottlenecks, and operational risks, while balancing engineering trade-offs.

  AmazonSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Metrics Collection SystemMedium

  Design an end-to-end distributed metrics collection and monitoring pipeline capable of ingesting millions of data points per second, handling label cardinality risks, and supporting low-latency time-series queries.

  AmperitySoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design an Online SQL Query Service over Apache Iceberg TablesHard

  Design an online service that runs user-submitted SQL statements against data stored in Apache Iceberg tables. Covers the query lifecycle and API, metadata-driven planning with snapshots and manifests, distributed execution, multi-tenant admission control, commits for writes, and table maintenance.

  AmperitySoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Digital Asset Custody ServiceMedium

  This question tests your ability to design a high-security, distributed system for managing digital asset custody, focusing on secure key storage, transaction authorization, and auditability.

  Anchorage DigitalSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design async batched key-value fetcherHard

  This question evaluates understanding of designing asynchronous, batched request handling in a single-threaded event-loop, covering batching windows, key deduplication, response-to-callback correlation, consistency boundaries, error handling, timeouts/retries, cancellation, and backpressure.

  AnrokSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Deploy a Large Model to GPU WorkersHard

  Design a high-throughput, fault-tolerant artifact distribution system to deploy a 500 GB large language model across thousands of GPU worker nodes under strict time and bandwidth constraints.

  AnthropicMachine Learning EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Describe a Python design-and-coding approach in ColabMedium

  This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design and implement a Python-based solution within a cloud-hosted notebook environment, covering requirements elicitation, component and data-structure selection, modularization, testing, dependency and environment management, and basic performance analysis.

  AnthropicSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design Durable One-to-One Web Messaging at Large ScaleHard

  Design Web-only one-to-one messaging at 100 million DAU with durable deduplication, chat sharding, membership indexes, offline recovery, and replica-aware reads.

  AnthropicSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design Instagram (Feed, Photos, and Friend Recommendations)Medium

  Design a scalable social media platform supporting photo uploads, timeline feed generation, follow graphs, and friend recommendations. This problem tests distributed storage, feed fan-out strategies under skewed follower distributions, and graph-based recommendation systems.

  AnthropicSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design Large Model-Weight Distribution to GPU WorkersHard

  Design a high-throughput, fault-tolerant distribution platform that transfers multi-hundred-gigabyte model weights to tens of thousands of GPU worker nodes with integrity validation, progressive rollouts, and fast rollback capabilities.

  AnthropicSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design One-to-One ChatMedium

  This question evaluates expertise in designing scalable, real-time one-to-one messaging systems, testing knowledge of distributed systems principles, message persistence and retrieval, delivery semantics, session and WebSocket management, ordering, retries, deduplication, and trade-offs between streaming and in-memory technologies such as Kafka and Redis. It is commonly asked to assess architectural reasoning about latency, availability, ordering guarantees and reliability within the System Design domain, and requires a mix of conceptual architectural understanding and practical implementation-level considerations.

  AnthropicSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design Peer-to-Peer Model Distribution Under a Shared Link CapMedium

  Design an internal peer-to-peer artifact distribution system to deliver large model weights from a single seed machine to thousands of cluster workers subject to a shared aggregate upload-and-download network link limit.

  AnthropicSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design Telemetry Ingestion and Reconcile Metric NamesMedium

  Design a scalable telemetry ingestion pipeline that standardizes and reconciles metric naming inconsistencies and schema drift across disparate client libraries, historical stores, and real-time query engines.

  AnthropicSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a Batched LLM Inference Service Assuming Each Batch Takes 100 msHard

  A system design question on serving large language model inference by batching requests, given the interviewer's assumption that every batch finishes in 100 ms. It tests batching policy, capacity math, latency budgets, returning results to callers, failure handling, and whether a fixed batch time holds when prompt and response lengths vary.

  AnthropicSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Collaborative Prompt PlaygroundMedium

  Design a collaborative prompt playground with conflict-aware editing, immutable versions, asynchronous model runs, and reliable input and result provenance.

  AnthropicSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Concurrent Image Processing ServiceHard

  Design a resilient, distributed image-processing pipeline that safely scales from a single worker to hundreds of concurrent nodes while guaranteeing job lease safety, idempotent output writes, and clean cancellation.

  AnthropicSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Crash-Resilient LRU CacheHard

  This question evaluates a candidate's competency in designing a crash-resilient LRU cache, including which data and ordering must be persisted, durability and recovery concerns, and trade-offs between latency and persistence.

  AnthropicSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a Distributed Rate LimiterMedium

  Tests the candidate's ability to design a low-latency, highly available distributed rate-limiting service that coordinates shared state across geographically distributed API gateways while gracefully handling network partitions and datastore failures.

  AnthropicSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Dynamically Batched Inference APIHard

  Design a scalable, multi-tenant LLM inference serving platform that balances Time-to-First-Token (TTFT) and throughput using dynamic iteration-level batching, KV cache memory management, and strict admission control.

  AnthropicMachine Learning EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Model Inference API and Optimize Its GPU UsageMedium

  A system design interview question that asks you to design an inference API for a trained model served on GPUs, covering the public API, streamed responses, request queueing, scheduling onto GPU workers, overload handling and failure recovery. Follow-up questions probe how to raise GPU throughput and memory efficiency without missing latency targets.

  AnthropicSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a One-on-One Chat ServiceMedium

  Design a highly available, low-latency one-on-one messaging system capable of delivering messages in real time, maintaining strict ordering, and handling offline synchronization.

  AnthropicSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a Parallel and Resumable Model DownloaderMedium

  Design a parallel model downloader with version-bound byte ranges, resumable verified pieces, bounded resource use, and atomic publication of complete artifacts.

  AnthropicSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Resilient Chat SystemMedium

  Design a resilient, distributed 1:1 and group messaging system focusing on durability guarantees, strict message ordering, robust fan-out, and reliable offline catch-up under partial failures.

  AnthropicSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a Resumable Parallel Downloader for Game Client PatchesMedium

  Design a game launcher's patch downloader that fetches a multi-gigabyte update in parallel byte-range chunks, survives crashes and connection drops without re-downloading verified bytes, and only ever exposes a complete, verified patch to the game client.

  AnthropicSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Resumable, Parallel Fetcher for Huge Dataset ReleasesMedium

  Design a node-side fetcher that downloads multi-terabyte dataset releases in parallel byte ranges, resumes from verified pieces after crashes, and atomically publishes only complete releases. Tests manifest design, range-request validation, durable progress tracking, and atomic filesystem publication.

  AnthropicSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Shared API Request Workbench With Versioned RunsMedium

  Design a team tool where engineers co-edit a shared collection of HTTP request templates, freeze them into immutable versions, and execute versions asynchronously against third-party APIs with full provenance of inputs, config, and results.

  AnthropicSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite