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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
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- 11
- Topics
- 8
- Languages
Showing 451–480 of 721 results
- NetflixMediumSoftware EngineerModel ads demand data for reporting
This question tests the ability to design a robust data pipeline and schema for tracking ad performance metrics, focusing on handling event-level data, aggregations, and dimension consistency.
System DesignOnsiteData EngineeringData ModelingETL - NetflixMediumSoftware EngineerModel data for an ads platform
This question evaluates proficiency in data modeling and database schema design for advertising systems, including entity-relationship modeling, privacy-aware user identifier handling, and delivery/tracking log representation.
System DesignOnsite - New RelicMediumBackend EngineerDesign a Kafka Consumer Service That Groups Trace Events by Trace ID
Design a distributed service that consumes trace events from Kafka, groups every event sharing a trace ID, and hands each complete trace to an existing processing function. Covers partitioning, in-memory versus external state, deciding when a trace is complete, and traces that stay open for hours.
System DesignOnsite - NooksMediumSoftware EngineerHow would you throttle a crawler?
This question evaluates competency in scalable distributed system design, including rate limiting, request scheduling, concurrency control, fault tolerance, backoff/retry strategies, deduplication, and observability for networked crawlers.
System DesignOnsite - NotionMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Shared Calendar Service
This problem tests the ability to design a scalable shared calendar system with support for recurring events, granular permission models, and notification scheduling.
System DesignOnsiteDatabase SchemaScalabilityAsynchronous Processing - NubankMediumSoftware EngineerDesign Chargeback Ingestion and CSV Delivery
Tests the ability to design an end-to-end financial transaction pipeline that ingests, deduplicates, and validates chargeback events, then reliably batches and delivers immutable CSV files to external card schemes via SFTP.
System DesignOnsiteFintechBatch ProcessingEvent-Driven - NubankEasySoftware EngineerDesign a chargeback ingestion and export system
This question assesses the ability to design a distributed system that reliably ingests high-volume transaction records and prepares them for periodic downstream delivery while ensuring data consistency and auditability.
System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsIdempotencyData Pipelines - NuroHardBackend EngineerDesign Webhooks and Metric Aggregation
Design a webhook delivery platform and vehicle telemetry aggregation system. The solution covers multi-tenant subscriptions, at-least-once delivery, retries, signing, DLQs, endpoint isolation, high-volume ingestion, stream processing, raw storage, rollups, alerting, late events, and downsampling.
System DesignOnsite - NuroHardSoftware EngineerSchedule CPU and GPU Video Processing
Design a distributed heterogeneous batch-processing system to schedule and execute multi-stage video pipelines across CPU and GPU worker clusters with fault tolerance, backpressure, and cost-efficient resource management.
System DesignOnsitesystem-designdistributed-systemsbatch-processing - NuroHardSoftware EngineerSearch Large Vehicle Records with Bounded Memory
Design a petabyte-scale search engine for autonomous vehicle records supporting multidimensional range queries, bounded-memory query execution, and stable streaming pagination.
System DesignOnsitesystem-designdistributed-systemsbig-data - OktaMediumBackend EngineerDesign Cross-Domain SSO and OIDC Access to Third-Party Tools
Design cross-domain SSO with OIDC authorization-code flow, separate site sessions, secure account linking, third-party federation, and delegated API authorization.
System DesignOnsite - OktaMediumBackend EngineerDesign Single Sign-On Across Two Acquired Sites With OIDC Federation
Design cross-domain single sign-on after one company acquires a second site on a different domain, then extend it to many sites and to delegated API access for third-party tools, covering the authorization-code flow, session separation, and the authentication-versus-authorization distinction.
System DesignOnsitesystem-designauthenticationoidc - OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerDesign Bakery Chain Card Payments With Tips and Nightly Settlement
Design the payment system for a bakery chain's counter terminals, where a card is authorized for the purchase, a tip is added afterward, and each location's transactions are captured together in a nightly settlement batch that must scale as the chain grows.
System DesignOnsitesystem-designpaymentsidempotency - OpenAIMediumMachine Learning EngineerDesign Duplicate File Detection
This question tests the ability to design a scalable content-based deduplication system using cryptographic hashing and distributed storage principles to manage large-scale file ingestion.
System DesignOnsiteScalabilityDistributed SystemsHashing - OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerDesign GPU Scheduling for a Video Generation Platform
This question tests your ability to design a distributed job scheduling system that manages heterogeneous GPU resources for computationally expensive, variable-length video generation tasks.
System DesignOnsiteGPU SchedulingDistributed SystemsLatency - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerDesign IDE Sandbox and Payments
This question evaluates system design competencies such as distributed systems architecture, scalability, isolation and security, API and state-machine design, storage and synchronization, resiliency, observability, and compliance applied to two domains: a cloud IDE sandbox and a payment processing backend, with domain: System Design.
System DesignOnsite - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerDesign Photo Storage with SHA-256 Content Deduplication and Safe Deletion
Design a photo storage service that deduplicates identical uploads by their SHA-256 content hash. Cover the upload flow with server-side verification, concurrent identical uploads, deletion with reference counting and garbage collection, and the privacy risks of deduplicating across users. It tests content-addressed storage design.
System DesignOnsite - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerDesign Power-Grid Device Monitoring over Unreliable Networks: Dedup and Late Events
Design a monitoring platform for power-grid devices that report readings and upload logs over unreliable public networks. Ingestion must be idempotent, deduplicate retransmissions, handle out-of-order and late events and accept batched uploads. It tests IoT ingestion, event-time processing and resilience to reconnect storms.
System DesignOnsite - OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerDesign Slack-like multi-tenant global messaging system
This question tests the ability to design a global, multi-tenant messaging platform that handles high-concurrency real-time delivery, data isolation, and low-latency synchronization across distributed environments.
System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsMulti-tenancyReal-time - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerDesign a CI/CD system with stuck-job handling
This problem tests your ability to design a distributed job scheduling and orchestration system that handles process failures, network partitions, and job timeouts to ensure reliable execution in a high-scale environment.
System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsFault ToleranceCI/CD - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerDesign a Chat Assistant Inference Service: Streaming, Free-Tier Limits, GPU Scheduling
Design the serving system for a chat assistant built on a large language model: stream replies token by token, rate-limit a free tier alongside paid users, schedule requests onto GPUs efficiently, and meet latency targets. It tests streaming protocols, batching, GPU memory limits, rate limiting and overload handling.
System DesignOnsite - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerDesign a Cloud IDE That Edits and Runs Code in Browser-Accessible Workspaces
Design a cloud IDE in which developers edit and run code and use a terminal in the browser while their files and execution environments live on remote servers. It tests workspace lifecycle and cold starts, isolation of untrusted code, durable file storage, real-time editor and terminal channels, host scheduling, and failure handling at scale.
System DesignOnsite - OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Digital Game Store and Distribution Platform Like Steam
A system design interview question asking you to design a digital game store and distribution platform like Steam, covering the catalog, purchases, player libraries, and game downloads and updates. It tests content delivery for very large builds, entitlement consistency with payments, and handling traffic spikes during sales and launches.
System DesignOnsite - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerDesign a Distributed Crossword Solver
This problem tests your ability to design a distributed system capable of solving large-scale constraint satisfaction problems (crossword puzzles) by partitioning search spaces and managing state across workers.
System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsBacktrackingConstraint Satisfaction - OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Fair-Queueing Image-Upscaling Service, One GPU per Job
Design the backend for a SaaS image-upscaling API where every job runs on exactly one accelerator and a scheduler must divide a shared fleet across many paying customers, testing job-store design, weighted scheduling by accelerator-time rather than job count, and recovery from worker, accelerator, and scheduler failures.
System DesignOnsitesystem-designschedulingfair-queueing - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerDesign a High-Throughput Payment Authorization and Settlement System
This problem tests the ability to design a high-throughput, fault-tolerant distributed system that bridges external payment processors with internal ledger state management.
System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsConsistencyPayments - OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Highly Available Conversational AI Service
Start with a minimal stateless conversational AI endpoint that streams responses, then evolve it for scale and resilience. Cover safety and authorization, cancellation, admission control, backpressure, dependency failures, regional isolation, durable history, and metrics that separate serving issues from model issues.
System DesignOnsite - OpenAIHardSoftware EngineerDesign a Large-Scale Streaming AI Product Feature
Design an end-to-end streaming architecture for an AI product feature serving millions of concurrent users. The focus is on low-latency token streaming, connection lifecycle management, data persistence, and graceful failure recovery.
System DesignOnsiteStreaming APIsDistributed SystemsLLM Infrastructure - OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Live Elimination Puzzle Arena With Spectators
Design a real-time game in which up to ~150 players per arena solve timed puzzle rounds, the wrong and slowest are knocked out each round, and large audiences watch live standings. Tests partitioning by arena, authoritative timing, mid-round failover, and isolating spectator fan-out from gameplay.
System DesignOnsitesystem-designreal-timewebsockets - OpenAIMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Live Riddle Showdown With Round Eliminations and Spectators
Design the backend for a live multiplayer riddle showdown where wrong or slow answerers are eliminated each round and large audiences spectate in real time. Tests room sharding, authoritative round settlement, mid-round crash recovery, and isolating spectator traffic from gameplay.
System DesignOnsitesystem-designreal-timesharding
Netflix
Notion
Nuro
Okta
OpenAI