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System Design Interview Questions
Practice 9403 coding, system design and machine learning questions from 546 companies, sorted by role, topic and interview round. Every question has step-by-step hints, a code runner that supports 8 languages and an AI mentor; members also get the full solution walkthrough.
- 9403
- Questions
- 546
- Companies
- 11
- Topics
- 8
- Languages
Showing 271–300 of 721 results
- GoogleHardFrontend EngineerVisualize More Than One Hundred Million Map Points
Design a multiresolution map that turns over one hundred million points into cached heat maps and detailed pins without overwhelming the browser.
System DesignOnsite - GrammarlyMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Read-Once Chat System
This question evaluates a candidate's competence in large-scale system design and distributed messaging, including API and data model design, read-once delivery semantics, consistency trade-offs, and operational concerns like scaling, partitioning, and failure handling.
System DesignOnsite - GrammarlyMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a collaborative spreadsheet
This question evaluates system design and distributed-systems competencies such as real-time collaboration, concurrent edit conflict resolution, data modeling for workbooks and sheets, session management, persistence and concrete API design.
System DesignOnsite - HadrianHardSoftware EngineerMigrate a Continuously Used Database
This question tests your ability to design a zero-downtime database migration strategy that handles heterogeneous database engines while maintaining strict data consistency across concurrent read and write operations.
System DesignOnsiteDatabase MigrationCDCConsistency - HarveyMediumSoftware EngineerDesign Cloud File Storage
This question tests your ability to design a scalable cloud file storage and collaboration platform, focusing on the architectural separation between metadata and blob storage, chunking, deduplication, and granular access control.
System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsObject StorageAccess Control - HarveyMediumSoftware EngineerDesign File Storage with Metadata, Access Control, and Chunked Uploads
Design drive-style file storage with metadata and blob separation, ACL checks, resumable chunk uploads, atomic publication, and version conflicts.
System DesignOnsite - HarveyMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a RAG question-answering system
Design an enterprise-grade Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system capable of answering complex natural language queries over millions of internal documents with high precision, low latency, and verifiable citations.
System DesignOnsiteRAGVector DatabaseInformation Retrieval - HarveyMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Secure PDF Data Room
Design an enterprise-grade virtual data room (VDR) for secure legal document sharing, focusing on multi-tenant access control, instant permission revocation, dynamic watermarking, and tamper-evident audit logging.
System DesignOnsitesystem-designsecurityauthorization - HarveyMediumBackend EngineerDesign a secure document vault
This question evaluates a candidate's competencies in secure backend system design, covering authentication and authorization, metadata and object storage architectures, integrity verification for chunked uploads, scalability, and operational reliability.
System DesignOnsite - HebbiaMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Multi-Agent Chat Backend
This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design scalable, reliable backend architectures that integrate LLMs and multi-agent orchestration, covering distributed systems, streaming responses, conversation context management, tool integrations, observability, and secure handling of sensitive financial data.
System DesignOnsite - HexMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Notebook App That Synchronizes Notes
This question tests the ability to design a resilient client-server architecture for a collaborative editing application that must function reliably under network instability.
System DesignOnsiteOffline-firstSynchronizationConcurrency - HexMediumSoftware EngineerDesign an In-Flight Entertainment Experience for a Small Screen
This problem tests the ability to design a high-availability, accessible, and modular UI/UX system under significant physical and connectivity constraints.
System DesignOnsiteUI/UXEmbedded SystemsArchitecture - Hot Agent StartupMediumSoftware EngineerDesign Flight Booking and Voting Systems
This question evaluates system design competencies including large-scale backend architecture, data modeling and indexing, database internals, concurrency control to prevent overselling, and high-throughput real-time streaming and metrics for live updates.
System DesignOnsite - HubSpotHardSoftware EngineerDesign a Netflix-like streaming platform
A HubSpot software-engineer onsite system-design question: design a Netflix-like video streaming platform covering catalog browse by genre and curated rails (Recently Added, Top Ten), search, adaptive-bitrate playback across web, mobile and TV, cross-device resume, and an upload-to-streamable ingest pipeline. It evaluates service decomposition, data models and API contracts, transcoding and CMAF/multi-DRM packaging, CDN and caching strategy, session concurrency and consistency, multi-region failover, observability and A/B testing, graceful degradation, and cost control at millions of concurrent viewers. The worked solution sizes egress and heartbeat load, corrects the common concurrency, resume, and cache-TTL mistakes, and marks the MVP cut line.
System DesignOnsite - HubSpotHardSoftware EngineerDesign a near-real-time weather API
A HubSpot onsite system-design question: build a weather data platform that ingests hourly dumps for ~2,000 U.S. locations and serves the current temperature with an at-most-10-minute freshness SLA. It tests ingestion pipelines, idempotent retries and backfill, caching and invalidation, storage modeling, rate-limit handling, scaling, and observability on freshness SLOs.
System DesignOnsite - HubSpotEasySoftware EngineerDesign an hourly weather crawling service
This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design scalable, reliable data ingestion and delivery systems, covering competencies such as scheduling and crawling, data normalization, storage schema design, idempotent ingestion, rate limiting, retries, and monitoring.
System DesignOnsite - IllumioMediumSoftware EngineerDesign Multicloud Publishing and API Gateway
This question tests the ability to design a distributed system that reliably replicates data from a primary database to multiple cloud providers while exposing a unified, secure API gateway for external consumers.
System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsAPI GatewayCDC - IllumioHardSoftware EngineerDesign a Time-Series Database
This problem tests the ability to architect a high-throughput, horizontally scalable system for time-series data, balancing ingest performance with efficient range-query capability.
System DesignOnsiteTime-SeriesDistributed SystemsIndexing - InstacartMediumSoftware EngineerDesign an Inventory Service with Reservations, Hot SKUs and Oversell Prevention
A system design question about an inventory management service that reserves stock while customers check out. It tests how a candidate prevents overselling under concurrent updates, handles hot SKUs, manages reservation expiry and idempotency, and supports partial fulfillment of multi-item orders.
System DesignOnsite - InstacartMediumSoftware EngineerDesign an inventory management system
This question evaluates competency in system design, data modeling, distributed consistency, concurrency control, API design, idempotency, and scalability for backend inventory and reservation workflows.
System DesignOnsite - InstacartMediumSoftware EngineerDesign and Release a Consistent Dark-Store Inventory System
Design a strongly consistent micro-fulfillment (dark-store) inventory system that handles reservations, stock reconciliation, and idempotent retries, alongside a zero-downtime deployment strategy.
System DesignOnsitesystem-designdistributed-transactionsinventory-management - InstacartHardSoftware EngineerDesign product catalog service
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 product catalog service states assumptions, handles edge cases, explains trade-offs, and shows how to validate the result clearly.
System DesignOnsite - InstacartHardSoftware EngineerDesign scalable inventory system and avoid races
This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design scalable, highly available distributed systems with robust concurrency control and consistency reasoning, covering architecture, data modeling, caching, message-based integration, and operational concerns like observability and disaster recovery.
System DesignOnsite - InstacartMediumSoftware EngineerReserve Cart Inventory Without Overselling
Design a high-throughput inventory reservation system that locks stock when items are added to a cart, prevents overselling during flash promotions, handles automatic reservation expiration, and scales seamlessly under a 10x traffic spike.
System DesignOnsitesystem-designdistributed-systemsconcurrency - InstacartHardSoftware EngineerTroubleshoot a production incident end-to-end
Troubleshoot a production incident end-to-end 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.
System DesignOnsite - IntuitMediumSoftware EngineerScale a service you just built: schema trade-offs, new features, indexes, and search
System design deep dive on scaling a service built earlier in the same interview loop. Compare schema options, extend the data model for reviews, ratings, and keyword search, and reason about query performance, indexing, pagination, and when a dedicated search engine is worth adding.
System DesignOnsite - J.P. MorganMediumSoftware Engineer IIDesign Secure Token Authorization and Large-File Transfer
Design a secure, enterprise-grade file transfer service that supports resumable multi-gigabyte uploads/downloads alongside fine-grained, token-based authorization and key management.
System DesignOnsitesystem-designsecuritydistributed-systems - J.P. MorganMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Rate Limiter: Algorithm Trade-offs, Scalability and Availability
A high-level design question on a rate limiter that compares common limiting algorithms and then scales the chosen one across many servers while staying available. It tests trade-off reasoning about accuracy, memory, burst handling, shared state, and what happens when the limiter's own dependencies fail.
System DesignOnsite - J.P. MorganMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Reliable Bank Payment System
Design a reliable bank payment system that remains correct across retries, crashes, duplicate requests, and ambiguous external-rail timeouts. Define idempotent APIs, a durable state machine and ledger, transactional handoff, safe reconciliation, invariant monitoring, auditability, and operator remediation.
System DesignOnsite - J.P. MorganMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Scalable Notification System
This question assesses the ability to design a distributed, asynchronous notification system capable of handling high-throughput multi-channel messaging while maintaining strict delivery guarantees and rate-limiting policies.
System DesignOnsiteScalabilityMessage QueuesDistributed Systems
Google
Grammarly
Harvey
HubSpot
Instacart
Intuit
J.P. Morgan