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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 451–480 of 1311 results
- FigmaHardSoftware EngineerDesign and operate a monolith on Kubernetes
This question evaluates a candidate's competency in designing and operating a monolithic application on Kubernetes, covering platform engineering topics such as deployment topology, networking and traffic management, CI/CD and rollout strategies, resource management and autoscaling, stateful dependencies, observability, incident response, and disaster recovery. Commonly asked in System Design interviews to assess practical application of distributed systems and SRE principles—specifically the ability to reason about operational trade-offs, reliability, and incremental migration paths—this prompt sits in the System Design domain and emphasizes practical application with architectural reasoning rather than purely conceptual understanding.
System DesignHR Screen - FigureaiMediumData EngineerBuild a Firmware Data Quality and Release-Feedback Framework
This question tests the ability to design an end-to-end data pipeline architecture that ensures high-fidelity telemetry collection, automated quality validation, and safe release orchestration for embedded firmware devices.
System DesignTechnical ScreenData EngineeringFirmwareObservability - FigureaiMediumData EngineerDesign a Telemetry Platform Ingesting Two Gigabytes per Second
This question tests your ability to design a high-throughput, fault-tolerant telemetry ingestion pipeline capable of handling high-velocity data streams from distributed robotic systems.
System DesignTechnical ScreenData EngineeringScalabilityDistributed Systems - FivetranEasySoftware EngineerDesign a Simplified WhatsApp: Message Send and Receive, Schema, and Scaling
Design a simplified WhatsApp focused on sending and receiving messages: the online and offline delivery flow, client APIs, the database schema, and scaling. It tests connection routing, delivery guarantees and ordering, and a choice between relational and NoSQL storage justified by access patterns.
System DesignTechnical Screen - FlexportHardSoftware EngineerDesign Container Assignment with Incompatible Goods
Design a shipment-planning and container-packing service that assigns cargo items to ocean containers subject to physical dimensions, weight limits, and hazardous/incompatibility rules while supporting async workflows and plan approvals.
System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsOptimizationConcurrency - FlipsterEasySoftware EngineerDesign 64-bit distributed IDs and a parking lot
The question evaluates distributed-systems and scalability competencies for globally unique 64-bit ID generation (including sharding, time-ordering, fault tolerance and clock issues) as well as object-oriented design, concurrency control, API design, and data modeling for a parking lot backend.
System DesignTechnical Screen - FluidstackMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Distributed Job Scheduler for One-Off and Recurring Jobs
A system design question asking you to design a distributed job scheduler that runs jobs immediately, at a set time or on a recurring cron schedule across a pool of workers. It tests how you find due jobs at scale, prevent duplicate runs, recover from worker failures, and handle retries, bursts and missed runs.
System DesignTechnical Screen - FluidstackEasySoftware EngineerDesign a Fair GPU Training Job Platform
Design a centralized scheduling and execution platform for one-off ML training jobs across a shared, heterogeneous GPU cluster, balancing fair resource sharing, multi-GPU network topology, and fault tolerance.
System DesignOnsiteGPU SchedulingDistributed SystemsML Infrastructure - Fora TravelEasySoftware EngineerDesign Caching for a Hotel Booking System
Design a high-throughput caching and inventory architecture for a hotel booking platform that accelerates read-heavy search traffic while strictly preventing overselling through temporary holds and authoritative consistency.
System DesignOnsitesystem-designcachingdistributed-systems - Fora TravelMediumSoftware EngineerDesign Emergency Notification System
This question evaluates system design and engineering competencies related to large-scale, real-time notification systems, including distributed systems architecture, messaging and delivery mechanisms, data modeling, API design, scalability, reliability, security, and monitoring.
System DesignOnsite - Fora TravelMediumSoftware EngineerDesign Radius-Based Notifications from Mobile Locations
Tests the ability to design an end-to-end location ingestion and geo-fenced notification system, focusing on spatial indexing, staleness filtering, scalable fan-out, and hotspot mitigation.
System DesignTechnical Screensystem-designgeospatialdistributed-systems - Fora TravelEasySoftware EngineerDesign a Hierarchical Learning Content API
Design a relational schema and REST API for a three-tiered learning curriculum (Tracks, Modules, Lessons) supporting drag-and-drop reordering, transactional updates, and versioned caching.
System DesignOnsiteAPI DesignData ModelingCaching - FordMediumSoftware EngineerDesign EV Telemetry Monitoring App
This question evaluates skills in designing real-time telemetry systems, including vehicle data collection and transmission, backend ingestion and validation, API and frontend design, operational controls for per-vehicle data flow, and the incorporation of AI-assisted development into the engineering process.
System DesignTechnical Screen - Fuse EnergyMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Fitness Activity Tracking App with Followers and Leaderboards
Prepare for a Fuse Energy system design interview about design a fitness activity tracking app with followers and leaderboards. This question focuses on requirements, architecture, trade-offs, reliability, and follow-up discussion areas.
System DesignOnsite - Garner HealthMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Concurrent Appointment Booking System
Design a concurrent healthcare appointment scheduling system that prevents double booking, supports fast availability searches, and ensures reliable notifications and state auditability.
System DesignTechnical Screensystem-designconcurrencydistributed-systems - Garner HealthMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Doctor Appointment Booking System for Sudden Demand
Design a doctor appointment system with searchable availability, atomic booking, cancellation, and protection against double booking. The follow-up examines a vaccine-demand spike through waiting-room admission, fairness, throttling, hot-slot partitioning, caching, autoscaling, load shedding, and reconciliation.
System DesignTechnical Screen - GeneralmotorsMediumSoftware EngineerChoose Between a Monolith, Microservices, and a Modular Architecture
Compare monolithic and service-based architectures and plan incremental extraction or consolidation around domain boundaries, data ownership, and measured goals.
System DesignTechnical Screen - GeneralmotorsMediumSoftware EngineerMeet a 10-second latency and 99% availability target across 3-5 dependent services
An open-ended design discussion about an application that calls three to five dependent services and must keep latency under 10 seconds and availability at 99% or better. It tests objective definitions, availability and tail-latency math, timeouts, retries, fallbacks, and adapting as requirements change.
System DesignOnsite - GleanMediumFrontend EngineerDesign Real-Time Typeahead for Enterprise Search: History, People, Docs, Apps, Filters
Design real-time typeahead for an enterprise search product that suggests past searches, people, documents, apps and filters as the user types. Tests client request policy and stale-response handling, accessible combobox UI, permission-aware backend fan-out, blending across sources and latency budgets.
System DesignOnsite - Goldman SachsEasySoftware EngineerDesign a Pastebin Service: Requirements, Entities, APIs and End-to-End Architecture
Design a scalable text sharing (Pastebin) service that generates unique short URLs for submitted text snippets. This question assesses API design, data modeling, storage decoupling, key generation strategies, and caching mechanisms under high read concurrency.
System DesignOnsiteObject StorageCachingKey Generation - Goldman SachsMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Streaming Metrics Dashboard: Time-Range Queries and Event-Time Watermarks
Design the backend of a dashboard that shows metrics computed from a continuous event stream and lets users query any time range. The discussion focuses on answering range queries from pre-aggregated data and on how watermarks decide when event-time windows are complete despite late or out-of-order events.
System DesignOnsite - Goldman SachsMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Ten-Minute In-Memory Notification Deduplication Engine
Design a high-throughput, low-latency in-memory deduplication service that identifies and suppresses duplicate notifications within a 10-minute sliding window.
System DesignOnsiteIn-Memory CachingConcurrencyHigh Throughput - GongMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Service That Captures Zoom Meeting Recordings and Processes Them at Scale
A system design exercise for ingesting recorded Zoom meetings into a business product and processing them into transcripts and conversation analysis. It tests reliable ingestion despite missed notifications, rate-limited fetching, staged idempotent processing on costly compute, fairness between customers, reprocessing, and data deletion.
System DesignOther - GongMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Service That Finds Common Free Time Across Connected Calendars
A system design exercise for a service that finds times when a group of people is free, using calendars synced from external providers. It tests computing common free time correctly across time zones, keeping availability fresh within rate limits, preventing double bookings, and scaling queries and public booking pages.
System DesignOther - GoogleMediumSoftware EngineerDesign A Drive-Style Usage Quota Limiter
Design a distributed storage quota accounting and enforcement service for a cloud drive platform that handles concurrent multi-part uploads, deletions, retries, and usage drift reconciliation.
System DesignTechnical ScreenDistributed SystemsCloud StorageConcurrency - GoogleMediumSoftware EngineerDesign Calendar Event Conflict Handling
This question evaluates a candidate's competence in designing scalable calendar event and conflict-handling systems, focusing on data modeling, time semantics (time zones and recurrence), concurrency control, and distributed-system trade-offs, and falls under the System Design domain.
System DesignOnsite - GoogleMediumSoftware EngineerDesign LLM Summarization of E-commerce Reviews with Prompt-Injection and PII Defenses
A system design question about an e-commerce platform that ingests customer reviews and uses an LLM to summarize them for an internal dashboard. It probes the ingestion and summarization pipeline, trust and safety filtering, data sanitization and PII redaction, and defenses against prompt injection hidden in review text.
System DesignOnsite - GoogleMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Billing-Token Rate Limiter for AI Agents
Design a distributed rate limiter and quota enforcement service tailored for AI agent workloads where consumption is measured in variable billing tokens rather than fixed request counts.
System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsRate LimitingAI Infrastructure - GoogleMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a CI system that runs one million tests in ten minutes
Design a continuous integration system that builds a change and runs about one million tests within a ten-minute budget. Tests capacity estimation, sharding and scheduling by test duration, artifact distribution, caching and test selection, flaky tests, failure handling, and cost versus latency trade-offs.
System DesignOnsite - GoogleHardSoftware EngineerDesign a Collaborative Notes Service
Design a collaborative notes backend with CRUD, WebSocket editing, operation logs, snapshots, CRDT or Operational Transformation conflict handling, offline sync, note-based scaling, permissions, and recovery.
System DesignOnsite
Figma
Glean
Goldman Sachs
Gong
Google