Katkat

practice a little every day, paws crossed ♡

Software Engineer 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 331–360 of 1189 results

  • DatabricksHardSoftware Engineer
    Design a single-node persistent in-memory cache

    This question evaluates a candidate's skills in single-node cache design, including in-memory key/value storage, eviction policy management (e.g., LRU), durability considerations, concurrency control, and techniques for reducing contention such as sharding or striping.

    System DesignTechnical Screen
  • DatabricksMediumSoftware Engineer
    Design a stock order manager

    Design an equity Order Management System (OMS) that manages order lifecycles, ensures idempotent broker interactions, and guarantees state reconciliation under distributed failures.

    System DesignTechnical Screensystem-designdistributed-systemsfintech
  • DatabricksHardSoftware Engineer
    Design a thread-safe bounded queue

    This question evaluates skills in concurrent programming, synchronization primitives, and designing thread-safe bounded data structures that support blocking operations with timeouts, fairness, and backpressure.

    System DesignHR Screen
  • DatabricksMediumSoftware Engineer
    Design an Online Book Seller Platform

    Design an end-to-end e-commerce platform for selling books, balancing read-heavy catalog exploration with strictly consistent inventory reservation and fault-tolerant checkout workflows.

    System DesignOnsiteE-CommerceDistributed SystemsTransactions
  • DatabricksHardSoftware Engineer
    Design an Online Bookstore

    This problem tests your ability to design a distributed e-commerce platform by focusing on consistency models for inventory, scalable search architecture, and robust order processing.

    System DesignOnsiteMicroservicesDistributed SystemsConsistency
  • DatabricksMediumSoftware Engineer
    Design an online bookstore: DB insert succeeds but SQS publish fails, and duplicate messages

    System design question about an online bookstore whose order service inserts orders into a database and then publishes messages to Amazon SQS. Probes what should happen when the insert succeeds but the publish fails, how to keep the database and queue consistent across crashes, and how consumers avoid duplicate processing under at-least-once delivery.

    System DesignTechnical Screen
  • DatabricksMediumSoftware Engineer
    Design bookstore and chat messaging systems

    This question tests the ability to design two distinct systems: a reliable transactional e-commerce inventory service and a low-latency real-time chat application, focusing on appropriate database choices and communication protocols.

    System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsDatabasesReal-time
  • DatabricksHardSoftware Engineer
    Design concurrent range-aware file caching client

    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 concurrent range-aware file caching client states assumptions, handles edge cases, explains trade-offs, and shows how to validate the result clearly.

    System DesignHR Screen
  • DatabricksHardSoftware Engineer
    Identify and handle race conditions

    This question evaluates understanding of concurrency, race conditions, synchronization mechanisms, and performance trade-offs in designing thread-safe in-memory data structures like key-value stores and hit counters.

    System DesignTechnical Screen
  • DatabricksMediumSoftware Engineer
    Lowest-Price Book Aggregator Fanning Out to Hundreds of Async Bookstores

    Design a middleman service that takes an ISBN, bid price and payment method, queries several hundred asynchronous bookstores for the lowest price, and then orders, returns the price or reports no stock. Deep dives cover partial results and circuit breakers, caching against thundering herds, and order-and-charge consistency.

    System DesignOnsite
  • DatabricksMediumSoftware Engineer
    Single-Machine Cache with WAL Persistence, Sharded Locks and LRU

    Design and write pseudocode for a single-machine in-memory cache behind a web service, then add write-ahead-log persistence, shard it to cut lock contention, shrink critical sections, find deadlocks by inspection, and explain LRU eviction built from a linked list and a hash map.

    System DesignOnsite
  • DatabricksMediumSoftware Engineer
    Thread-Safe Durable Event Writer Shared by Thousands of Threads

    Design a thread-safe DataWriter whose push method durably appends opaque records of up to 1 KB to one local file while thousands of threads call it at once. Tests durability contracts, batching disk syncs across callers, crash-safe record framing and handling of failed writes.

    System DesignOnsite
  • DatadogHardSoftware Engineer
    Design log-query stream processor

    Design log-query stream processor 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 DesignTechnical Screen
  • DecagonHardSoftware Engineer
    Design a Durable Delayed Task Scheduler

    Design a distributed, durable task scheduler capable of scheduling millions of tasks to execute at exact future timestamps with high precision, at-least-once delivery, and automatic fault recovery.

    System DesignTechnical Screensystem-designdistributed-systemstask-scheduler
  • DecagonMediumSoftware Engineer
    Design an AI Gateway

    Design a high-throughput, multi-tenant AI Gateway that provides a unified API, intelligent routing, token-aware rate limiting, and observability across multiple upstream LLM providers.

    System DesignTechnical ScreenAPI GatewayLLM InfrastructureRate Limiting
  • DecagonMediumSoftware Engineer
    Design the Security Architecture for an LLM Chatbot Product

    A system design question on securing a chatbot built on a large language model that talks with people outside the company. It tests threat modeling for prompt injection and data leakage, user authentication and tool authorization outside the model, tenant isolation, sensitive-data handling, abuse controls, auditing and incident response.

    System DesignOnsite
  • DigitaloceanMediumSoftware Engineer
    Design a Multi-Organization Advertising Platform with Performance Statistics

    Design ad management, serving, event collection, deduplicated statistics, and fair performance comparisons across organizations and campaigns.

    System DesignOnsite
  • DiscordEasySoftware Engineer
    Design Slack-like chat system

    An onsite system-design interview question asking you to design the chat subsystem for a Slack/Discord-like app: workspaces, channels, 1:1 and group DMs, full message history, real-time updates, and edit/delete. It tests data modeling, storage and partitioning, fanout strategy, real-time WebSocket delivery, and per-conversation ordering and consistency.

    System DesignOnsite
  • DiscordMediumSoftware Engineer
    Design a TCP Discord-like chat server

    This question evaluates a candidate's skills in system design, TCP-based protocol design, real-time messaging, data modeling, persistence, session/reconnection handling, and concurrency control for backend services.

    System DesignOnsite
  • DiscordMediumSoftware Engineer
    Design leader election using Redis leases

    This question evaluates a candidate's understanding of distributed coordination and leader election using a central in-memory datastore, focusing on lease-based leadership, failover, and correctness under partitions and clock skew.

    System DesignOnsite
  • DisneyMediumSoftware Engineer
    Design a Flash Sale with a Virtual Queue and Exact Inventory

    Design a high-scale ticketing and merchandise flash-sale platform featuring a virtual waiting room, controlled admission rate, strictly zero-oversell inventory reservation, and idempotent checkout.

    System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsConcurrencyCaching
  • DisneyMediumSoftware Engineer
    Design a Twitter-like microblogging platform

    This problem tests your ability to design a distributed system capable of handling high-throughput write operations, efficient read-heavy feed generation, and the trade-offs between system consistency and availability.

    System DesignOnsiteScalabilityCachingDistributed Systems
  • DisneyEasySoftware Engineer
    Design a frontend shopping cart and feature flags

    This question evaluates frontend system-design skills including client-side state management, synchronization and conflict-resolution strategies, caching and offline resilience, performance for large carts, observability, and feature-flag/remote-config design for targeted rollouts and experiments.

    System DesignOnsite
  • DisneyHardSoftware Engineer
    Design a global multi-game leaderboard

    This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design a scalable, real-time distributed leaderboard service, testing skills in API design, data modeling, ranking algorithms, ingestion and read-path architecture, caching, sharding, consistency-versus-latency trade-offs, idempotency, anti-cheat measures, and disaster recovery.

    System DesignOnsite
  • DockerMediumSoftware Engineer
    Design a container image registry

    This problem tests your ability to design a distributed, content-addressable storage system that handles large binary blobs and metadata while optimizing for read/write performance and storage efficiency.

    System DesignTechnical ScreenDistributed SystemsStorageScalability
  • DoorDashMediumSoftware Engineer
    Debug round-robin request router

    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 Debug round-robin request router states assumptions, handles edge cases, explains trade-offs, and shows how to validate the result clearly.

    System DesignTechnical Screen
  • DoorDashHardSoftware Engineer
    Deep-dive a project architecture

    An open-ended DoorDash software-engineer system-design screen: pick a real project and deep-dive its architecture end to end. Candidates draw the diagram, state invariants, walk read/write paths, justify storage and trade-offs, capacity-plan, cover reliability/security/observability with SLOs, recount a real incident, and propose a quantified 10x-traffic plan. Includes a full worked example built around a real-time delivery dispatch and live order-tracking service.

    System DesignTechnical Screen
  • DoorDashMediumSoftware Engineer
    Design API that aggregates three downstream APIs

    This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design an API aggregator, covering skills in service orchestration, fault tolerance, latency and SLO management, error handling, and observability for distributed HTTP/JSON services.

    System DesignTechnical Screen
  • DoorDashMediumSoftware Engineer
    Design Food Ratings and Driver Payouts

    This question evaluates system design competencies such as API design, data modeling and storage selection for aggregated 5-point ratings, handling user-generated posts and likes, service decomposition, consistency trade-offs, scalability, and designing a monthly batch payout pipeline for driver earnings.

    System DesignOnsite
  • DoorDashMediumSoftware Engineer
    Design Food-Item Reviews, Ratings, and Mutable Vote Counts

    Design item reviews and votes with purchase eligibility, unique reviews, rating aggregates, reliable counters, pagination, and recoverable caching.

    System DesignOnsite