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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 361–390 of 721 results

  • MetaMediumSoftware Engineer
    Design a YouTube/Netflix video platform

    This question evaluates a candidate's understanding of distributed systems architecture, media processing and delivery concepts including upload resiliency, transcoding into multiple bitrates, scalable storage and low-latency streaming.

    System DesignOnsite
  • MetaHardSoftware Engineer
    Design a content processing service

    This question evaluates understanding of designing scalable, reliable content-processing systems that handle high-throughput ingestion, ML-based classification and rule evaluation, priority/backpressure mechanisms, storage and API design, experimentation hooks, and operational concerns like observability and cost.

    System DesignOnsite
  • MetaMediumSoftware Engineer
    Design a flight search platform

    This question tests the ability to design a high-scale search platform that aggregates volatile data from heterogeneous third-party providers while maintaining low latency and high availability.

    System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsAPI DesignCaching
  • MetaMediumSoftware Engineer
    Design a game leaderboard service

    This question tests the ability to design a high-throughput, low-latency leaderboard system, focusing on data structures for ranking, storage trade-offs, and scalability under heavy write and read loads.

    System DesignOnsiteScalabilityData StructuresCaching
  • MetaMediumSoftware Engineer
    Design a large-scale web crawler

    This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design scalable, fault-tolerant distributed systems for web-scale data acquisition, covering competencies such as crawler architecture, URL frontier management, deduplication, per-domain rate limiting and robots.

    System DesignOnsite
  • MetaMediumSoftware Engineer
    Design a live video comments system

    This problem tests your ability to design a high-throughput, real-time messaging system capable of handling sudden spikes in concurrent viewers and maintaining low latency for chat delivery.

    System DesignOnsiteWebSocketsPub/SubScalability
  • MetaMediumSoftware Engineer
    Design a marketplace price tracking service

    This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design scalable, reliable ingestion and processing pipelines, time-series price storage and querying, deduplication across users, and notification/alert mechanisms for a large-scale price-tracking service.

    System DesignOnsite
  • MetaMediumSoftware Engineer
    Design a post privacy/visibility system

    This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design access control and visibility mechanisms for social posts, covering privacy models, efficient read-time enforcement, data modeling, caching strategies, and handling dynamic friendship and privacy updates.

    System DesignOnsite
  • MetaMediumSoftware Engineer
    Design a price drop tracking service

    This question evaluates system-design competencies such as scalable architecture, data modeling for time-series price history, external data ingestion and integration, alerting and monitoring, and trade-off reasoning for large-scale services.

    System DesignOnsite
  • MetaHardSoftware Engineer
    Design a product notifications system

    This question evaluates system design competencies for building a large-scale notifications platform—covering architecture, APIs, data modeling, event pipelines, delivery semantics (retries, deduplication, idempotency), targeting/segmentation, localization, monitoring, and legal compliance such as GDPR/CCPA.

    System DesignOnsite
  • MetaHardSoftware Engineer
    Design a real-time messenger

    A Meta software-engineer system-design onsite question: design a real-time messenger supporting 1:1 and group chats at 100M MAU with p99 send-to-receive latency under 150 ms. It covers APIs, message ordering and idempotency, delivery semantics, multi-device sync, WebSocket fanout, storage/search, E2EE, abuse controls, retention/GDPR, multi-region failover, and observability.

    System DesignOnsite
  • MetaHardMachine Learning Engineer
    Design a recommendation system

    This question evaluates competence in designing large-scale recommendation systems and ML engineering skills such as candidate generation, feature store design (offline/online and point-in-time correctness), real-time signal ingestion, ranking and re-ranking, online exploration, cold-start strategies, feedback-bias mitigation, experimentation, and operational reliability. It is commonly asked to assess the ability to make architecture-level trade-offs for scalability, latency and throughput targets, multi-objective optimization, data governance and outage fallback behavior; it falls under the System Design and Machine Learning domain and requires practical, architecture-level application with conceptual trade-off reasoning rather than low-level implementation detail.

    System DesignOnsite
  • MetaHardSoftware Engineer
    Design a ticketing purchase system

    This question evaluates understanding of large-scale system design and distributed systems concepts, including concurrency control, consistency models, real-time fanout, payment idempotency, and failure handling for high-concurrency ticketing with interactive seat maps.

    System DesignOnsite
  • MetaMediumSoftware Engineer
    Design ad click tracking and dashboard at scale

    This problem tests your ability to design a high-throughput, fault-tolerant ingestion pipeline and an aggregation service for real-time analytics dashboarding.

    System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsData PipelinesScalability
  • MetaHardSoftware Engineer
    Design an Instagram-like photo-sharing platform

    This question evaluates system design competencies including distributed systems, scalability and capacity planning, data modeling and storage strategies, API design, media processing and CDN integration, consistency models, operational reliability, observability, and estimation.

    System DesignOnsite
  • MetaMediumSoftware Engineer
    Design an On-Demand Delivery Platform

    This question evaluates skills in designing scalable, reliable distributed systems with emphasis on state management (shopping cart persistence), real-time telemetry (courier location updates), workflow orchestration (order lifecycle and dispatch), and operational concerns like scalability and reliability.

    System DesignOnsite
  • MetaHardSoftware Engineer
    Design an ad click tracking system

    This problem tests your ability to design a high-scale, fault-tolerant distributed system capable of processing massive volumes of real-time ad click events while ensuring data consistency and accuracy.

    System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsHigh-throughputData Engineering
  • MetaMediumSoftware Engineer
    Design an online auction system

    A Meta software engineer onsite system design question: build an eBay-style online auction platform supporting proxy bidding, reserve prices, buy-it-now and soft close at 500k concurrent auctions and 5M watchers with p99 bid-to-UI latency under 200 ms. The answer covers APIs, data model, the proxy-bid pricing algorithm, single-writer-per-auction consistency, idempotent bid placement, real-time push trade-offs (polling vs long polling vs SSE vs WebSockets), sharding, finalization and recovery. It also covers anti-sniping, fraud, escrow payments, auditability and capacity estimation.

    System DesignOnsite
  • MetaMediumSoftware Engineer
    Design an online chess game with undo and leaderboard

    This problem tests the ability to design a low-latency, stateful system for a turn-based game, focusing on synchronization, undo history management, and scalable real-time leaderboard updates.

    System DesignOnsiteReal-timeConcurrencyWebSockets
  • MetaHardSoftware Engineer
    Design an online coding judge

    This problem tests the ability to architect a distributed, multi-tenant system for sandboxed execution of untrusted code, emphasizing security, scalability, and performance isolation.

    System DesignOnsiteSecurityDistributed SystemsSandboxing
  • MetaMediumSoftware Engineer
    Design an online coding platform

    This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design scalable, secure distributed systems with emphasis on architecture, data modeling, service design, sandboxed code execution, and performance under high load for an online coding platform.

    System DesignOnsite
  • MetaHardData Engineer
    Design batch and streaming ETL architecture

    Design batch and streaming ETL 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.

    System DesignOnsite
  • MetaMediumSoftware Engineer
    Design coding platform with global leaderboard

    This question tests the ability to design a high-throughput, real-time leaderboard system that balances strong consistency for rankings with the scalability required for a global user base.

    System DesignOnsiteScalabilityCachingDatabase Partitioning
  • MetaMediumSoftware Engineer
    Design real-time live comments

    This question evaluates the candidate's ability to design scalable, low‑latency real‑time messaging systems, focusing on high‑fanout delivery, approximate time ordering, moderation and rate‑limiting mechanisms, and replay of recent events.

    System DesignOnsite
  • MetaHardMachine Learning Engineer
    Design scalable media storage and delivery

    This question evaluates an engineer's ability to design globally distributed, highly scalable media storage and delivery systems, covering competencies in object storage and metadata modeling, CDN integration, replication and consistency strategies, security and access control, background processing, observability, quotas, and cost/performance trade-offs. It is commonly asked in system design interviews to assess reasoning about durability, availability, latency and cost trade-offs while requiring both high-level architectural thinking and practical implementation details; category: System Design; level of abstraction: combines conceptual architecture with practical application considerations.

    System DesignOnsite
  • MetaHardSoftware Engineer
    Design searchable status & geolocation services

    Design searchable status & geolocation services 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
  • MetaMediumSoftware Engineer
    Design the Frontend Data Flow and APIs for a Social Media News Feed

    A product architecture design problem: starting from a feed mock-up, design the client data flow and APIs for a social news feed on web and mobile. It tests UX flow analysis, the shape of the feed response object, cursor-based pagination, and edge cases across client types.

    System DesignOnsite
  • MetaMediumSoftware Engineer
    Design ticketing system with seat hold

    This question evaluates a candidate's skills in system design, distributed systems, concurrency control, data modeling, and scalability, testing their ability to reason about correctness and performance under high contention and heavy traffic as well as trade-offs between consistency and availability.

    System DesignOnsite
  • MetaHardData Engineer
    Evaluate impact of short videos in feed

    This question evaluates competency in metrics definition, causal experimentation, product analytics, and feed system behavior within the System Design and Data Engineering domain.

    System DesignOnsite
  • MetaHardSoftware Engineer
    Find Nearby High Scores in a Large Game Leaderboard

    Design a high-scale gaming leaderboard service capable of real-time score updates, deterministic tie-breaking, friend-filtered leaderboards, and efficient "nearby competitor" queries under extreme write loads.

    System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsIn-Memory CachingLeaderboard