System Design interview questions

Showing 1171–1200 of 1311 results

• Scale a key-value store with consistent hashingHard

  Scale a key-value store with consistent hashing 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.

  SoFiSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a RAG system for vehicle documentsHard

  This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design a Retrieval-Augmented Generation system, testing competencies in information retrieval, vector search, document ingestion and chunking, metadata modeling, citation handling, security, observability, and scalability within the system design and NLP/information-retrieval domain.

  SonatusSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design an IP blacklist APIMedium

  This question evaluates API and backend system design skills for network security and distributed caching, encompassing data modeling for exact IPs and CIDR ranges, cache architecture and invalidation, consistency and failure handling, scaling, and observability.

  SotiSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design scenario-based speaking featureHard

  This question evaluates system-design competency in building scalable, real-time, multilingual audio-driven learning features, including product modeling, session orchestration, audio pipelines (ASR/TTS), personalization, localization, telemetry, and privacy/security considerations.

  SpeakSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design speaking scenarios and auth/profile APIHard

  This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design scalable, real-time speaking-practice features and a minimal authentication/profile API, encompassing system architecture, service decomposition, data modeling, ASR/LLM integration, personalization, security and privacy, and operational concerns like scaling and observability.

  SpeakSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Public Upload and Hosting Service for Playlist Cover ImagesMedium

  A Spotify system design question: design a service that lets users upload, replace and remove a public cover image for their playlists, served to the app and to third-party embeds. Follow-ups cover how an auditor would review image changes and how upload and processing failures are handled.

  SpotifyBackend EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Game Store with Purchases, Downloads, and ReviewsMedium

  Design connected game-store pages for category browsing, purchases, authorized downloads, and reviews with consistent data and retry behavior.

  Sprinter HealthSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a scalable game app storeMedium

  This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design a scalable backend system, covering competencies in system architecture, data modeling, distributed services, media asset delivery, secure transactional flows, and operational trade-offs around scalability, availability, and consistency.

  Sprinter HealthSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Count-Metrics Monitoring PlatformMedium

  Design a scalable count-metrics monitoring and alerting platform capable of tracking real-time event counts and rates, grouping by dimensional labels, handling duplicate/late events, and enforcing cardinality limits.

  StripeSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Distributed Metrics CounterHard

  This question tests the ability to architect a highly available, scalable system for ingesting and aggregating high-throughput telemetry data while managing trade-offs between consistency and performance.

  StripeSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Feature Flag Service with Percentage Rollouts and Allow/Block ListsHard

  System design question: design a feature flag service, similar in spirit to Amazon's Weblab, that lets teams turn features on or off, roll them out to a percentage of users, and force them on or off with allow and block lists. It probes where flag checks run, how users are assigned consistently, and how changes reach every service safely.

  StripeSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a Merchant Ledger ServiceMedium

  This question tests your ability to design a distributed ledger system that ensures high transactional integrity, strict consistency for financial balances, and reliable idempotency in a high-concurrency environment.

  StripeSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Scalable Idempotent Ledger ServiceMedium

  Design a high-throughput, fault-tolerant double-entry ledger service featuring immutable postings, strict write idempotency, and tunable balance freshness.

  StripeSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a Superhero Dispatch SystemMedium

  This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design reliable, distributed backend systems with emphasis on transactional correctness, concurrency control for single-winner acceptance races, geo-spatial querying for proximity matching, eventing/notification pipelines, and operational observability for mission-critical dispatch.

  StripeSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a local activity counter serviceHard

  This question evaluates a candidate's skills in designing large-scale distributed systems, focusing on near-real-time ingestion and aggregation, idempotency/deduplication, time-windowed (tumbling and sliding) analytics, hot-key sharding, storage and backfill strategies, and operational concerns including monitoring and privacy.

  StripeSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design an Idempotent Double-Entry LedgerMedium

  Design a highly reliable, idempotent double-entry ledger system that guarantees strict consistency, append-only immutability, and supports high-concurrency writes on hot accounts.

  StripeSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design ledger and bikemap integrationHard

  This question evaluates competency in designing strongly consistent financial ledgers and integrating an external routing service, testing data modeling, distributed transactions, linearizability and idempotency, scalability, security, API design, and observability in the System Design domain.

  StripeSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design Event Email SystemMedium

  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 Event Email System states assumptions, handles edge cases, explains trade-offs, and shows how to validate the result clearly.

  StubHubSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design Internal Chat and Re-engagement EmailsMedium

  This question evaluates a candidate's competency in designing scalable, real-time messaging systems and re-engagement workflows, covering distributed systems concepts such as WebSocket-based bidirectional communication, presence, cross-server message routing, message persistence, APIs, storage trade-offs, inactivity detection, and email-triggering workflows. Commonly asked in the System Design category, it tests high-level architectural reasoning and practical application of scalability, reliability, and failure-handling trade-offs when integrating persistent WebSocket connections, cross-server routing, and background email jobs in a distributed platform.

  StubHubSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Global Marketing Email PlatformMedium

  This problem tests your ability to design a high-throughput, fault-tolerant email delivery system that handles scheduling across time zones, manages email templates, and provides basic analytics.

  StubHubSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Review getEvents endpoint for readability, performance, scalability, securityHard

  A StubHub software-engineer technical-screen system-design exercise: review and fix a GET /events HTTP handler that loads related data (venue, performers, tickets, transactions) per event. Candidates must find and fix the N+1 query, then harden the endpoint across readability/architecture, performance (pagination, indexing, caching), scalability (timeouts, retries, rate limiting), and security (authN/authZ, injection, PII), with trade-offs, SLOs, and a test plan.

  StubHubSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a One-to-One Chat SystemMedium

  This problem tests your ability to design a distributed, low-latency, real-time messaging system, focusing on message delivery guarantees, state management, and scalability.

  TemporalSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Balance Backend Availability, Maintainability, and ScalabilityMedium

  Design a high-throughput vehicle telemetry and diagnostics backend while evaluating explicit architectural trade-offs among availability, maintainability, and scalability.

  TeslaSoftware EngineerSystem DesignHR Screen
• Describe how you use KubernetesMedium

  Describe how you use Kubernetes 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.

  TeslaSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a Distributed Blob Storage System for Build ArtifactsHard

  Design a distributed storage system for build artifacts, similar to a distributed NoSQL database but storing opaque blobs with looser ACID requirements. It tests separating immutable data from consistent metadata, upload atomicity, replication and repair, handling download fan-out, and safe retention and garbage collection.

  TeslaSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Supercharger Backend: Billing, Stall Telemetry and Nearest Available ChargerHard

  System design question on the backend for an electric-vehicle fast-charging network: billing each session by the energy delivered, storing stall health telemetry long term, and showing drivers the nearest available charger with its price. Probes secure device communication, DNS and routing, local buffering and sync versus async choices.

  TeslaSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a Video Sharing PlatformMedium

  Design a resilient, large-scale video sharing and streaming platform that handles multi-gigabyte uploads, asynchronous transcoding, and low-latency global delivery. This question tests your ability to design chunked upload protocols, idempotent processing pipelines, and CDN-backed adaptive streaming architectures.

  TeslaSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design an Order Fulfillment SystemMedium

  Design an order-fulfillment system and explain its major components, data flow, and reliability trade-offs.

  TeslaSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design booking and settlement systemsMedium

  This question evaluates backend system design competencies such as concurrency control, transactional integrity, reconciliation, file ingestion and processing, idempotency, API design, and operational reliability.

  TeslaBackend EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design concurrency-safe shared payment account APIHard

  Design concurrency-safe shared payment account API 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.

  TeslaSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen