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System Design interview questions

1311 System Design questions from 230 companies, with hints, runnable code and solution walkthroughs.

Questions1311

60 easy819 medium432 hard

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System Design interview questions by the numbers

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Katkat has 1,311 System Design interview questions from 230 companies; the most come from OpenAI (8%), Meta (5%) and Amazon (4%). By difficulty: 5% easy, 62% medium and 33% hard. The most common round is Onsite (55%). Frequent concepts include System Design, Distributed Systems, Scalability and Caching.

Companies (230)

Difficulty

  • Easy5% · 60
  • Medium62% · 819
  • Hard33% · 432

Interview rounds

  • Onsite55% · 721
  • Technical Screen39% · 517
  • Online Assessment3% · 38
  • Other2% · 21
  • HR Screen1% · 13

Roles

  • Software Engineer91% · 1189
  • Machine Learning Engineer2% · 31
  • Data Engineer2% · 26
  • Backend Engineer2% · 25
  • Frontend Engineer1% · 19

Frequent concepts

  • System Design31% · 400
  • Distributed Systems24% · 316
  • Scalability15% · 196
  • Caching7% · 95
  • Concurrency7% · 91
  • system-design6% · 83

Showing 211–240 of 1311 results

  • Design a multi-tenant product catalog ingestion and serving system that processes periodic, complete merchant snapshots while deterministically layering administrator overrides, supporting atomic cutovers, and maintaining read consistency.

    AttentiveSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
  • Design a low-latency CDC pipeline that joins multiple databases, propagates updates and deletes, recovers state, and maintains a queryable output dataset.

    AutodeskSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
  • Design resumable upload and range-based download for files too large to transfer reliably in one request. Cover chunk identity, integrity hashes, idempotent completion, authorization, committed-file visibility, object-storage layout, and cleanup of abandoned sessions.

    AxonSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
  • Design a high-throughput time-series ingestion and query service that handles out-of-order, duplicate officer telemetry and returns the record closest in time to a requested query timestamp.

    AxonSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
  • This question evaluates system design and backend engineering competencies, including distributed orchestration, scheduling, scalability, reliability, operational monitoring, API design, and data modeling for a test orchestration service; it is categorized under System Design and related domains such as distributed systems and CI/CD platforms.

    AxonSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
  • Design a tamper-evident video chain-of-custody audit 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.

    AxonSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
  • This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design scalable, consistent, and resilient distributed systems for transactional domains, emphasizing API design, data modeling, concurrency control, idempotency, seat inventory guarantees, and external integrations like payments and ticketing.

    AxonSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
  • This question tests the ability to design a distributed, scalable image processing pipeline that integrates OCR with translation services while addressing latency, storage, and reliability concerns.

    AxonSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
  • 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 analytical tracking database states assumptions, handles edge cases, explains trade-offs, and shows how to validate the result clearly.

    AxonSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
  • This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design resilient, secure large-file ingestion systems with integrity verification, resumable chunked uploads, malware and file-type scanning, and an auditable tamper-evident chain of custody, commonly asked to assess architectural thinking about reliability, security, and compliance for evidentiary data. It is in the System Design domain (storage, APIs, background processing, and audit logging) and tests practical application of architectural trade-offs, failure-mode reasoning, and operational concerns rather than only theoretical concepts.

    AxonSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
  • This question evaluates architectural design skills for scalable, event-driven fulfillment systems, including competencies in inventory/container state tracking, high-throughput event processing, transactional dock-door scheduling, and vehicle routing optimization; domain: system design.

    AxonSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
  • This problem tests knowledge of distributed event streaming architecture, specifically handling high-throughput bulk processing while maintaining partition-level ordering and fault-tolerant delivery guarantees.

    BalyasnySoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
  • This problem tests the ability to design a task scheduling system that manages complex dependency graphs while operating under strict concurrency constraints.

    BalyasnySoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
  • Prepare for a Baseten system design interview about design a data pipeline for messy pod alerts and bad pod detection. This question focuses on requirements, architecture, trade-offs, reliability, and follow-up discussion areas.

    BasetenData EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
  • System design question: build an observability logging system that lets services emit structured logs and lets engineers query them. It covers non-blocking client buffering, ingestion with backpressure and a durable buffer, time-partitioned storage, indexing versus scanning trade-offs, query execution limits, and isolating noisy services.

    BasetenSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
  • This question evaluates product sense, system-design reasoning, and the ability to design risk-aware, real-time recommendation services for mobile layover experiences, emphasizing ambiguity handling and preventing catastrophic failures like missed flights.

    Basis AiSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
  • Design a highly available and auditable reward points service that ingests credit card and rent transactions, evaluates versioned earning rules, and maintains an append-only double-entry ledger.

    Bilt RewardsSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
  • This question tests your ability to design a distributed, asynchronous ticket processing system that handles high volume, prioritizes SLAs, and ensures reliable data delivery.

    BlinkSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
  • Tests the ability to design an ultra-low-latency, stateful streaming pipeline that ingests heterogeneous market data feeds, maintains running volume-weighted aggregates, handles trade adjustments, and serves high-throughput subscriber fanout.

    BloombergSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
  • This question tests the ability to design a thread-safe, high-concurrency registration system that handles FIFO ordering, capacity constraints, and efficient cancellation operations.

    BloombergSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
  • This question evaluates API design, stream-oriented buffer management, stateful packet assembly, input validation, concurrency control, testing strategy, and time/space complexity reasoning.

    BloombergSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
  • This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design concurrent, high-throughput in-memory subscription matching systems, covering skills in data structure selection, algorithmic complexity analysis, and concurrency control.

    BloombergSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
  • This question tests the ability to design a distributed, low-latency streaming pipeline that aggregates mention counts for entities, provides search capabilities, and triggers alerts based on configurable thresholds.

    BloombergSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
  • This question evaluates understanding of distributed messaging and stream-processing concepts—specifically Kafka internals such as partitions, replication, consumer groups, and delivery semantics—and the candidate's competency in reasoning about ordering, scalability, fault tolerance, and transactional guarantees.

    BloombergSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
  • This question evaluates front-end engineering competencies including client-side data modeling, state management, UI behavior for nested comment trees, sorting/filtering semantics, and persistence using localStorage.

    BobyardSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
  • This question evaluates full-stack system-design competencies, including CRUD API and data-model design for sortable queries with persisted user preferences, frontend-backend synchronization, and asynchronous long-running job orchestration, status/result APIs, and UI ordering for image generation; it falls under the System Design category and tests a mix of conceptual architectural reasoning and practical application design. It is commonly asked because it probes the ability to balance scalability, consistency, user experience, and fault-tolerant asynchronous processing when designing end-to-end systems that must handle persistence, ordering guarantees, and long-running background work.

    BobyardSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
  • Compare heap, stack, Protobuf, gRPC, SQL, CI/CD 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.

    Booking.comSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
  • This question evaluates a candidate's competency in designing scalable, low-latency telemetry and logging systems, covering distributed systems architecture, ingestion pipelines, data modeling, real-time querying, reliability, backpressure, partitioning, indexing, retention, and operational trade-offs.

    Booking.comSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
  • Diagnose failures via SSH and large logs 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.

    BoxSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
  • Explain and diagram your past system architecture 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.

    BoxSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite

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