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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 511–540 of 721 results
- OracleMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a URL shortener: short-code generation, fast redirects and scaling
A system design question that asks for a URL shortening service that turns long links into short codes and redirects visitors quickly. It tests requirements and capacity estimates, collision-free short-code generation, redirect caching and status codes, data modeling and partitioning, expiry, analytics and abuse handling.
System DesignOnsite - OracleMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a like-count system for a large video platform with viral-video bursts
A system design question for the like feature of a large video platform. It probes one-like-per-user correctness, serving counts and viewer state at huge read volume, absorbing bursts of likes on viral videos, exact versus approximate counting trade-offs, counter reconciliation, and abuse protection.
System DesignOnsite - OracleMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a photo-sharing social network with follows, media uploads and a home feed
A system design question for a photo and video sharing social network with follows, media uploads and a home feed. It probes estimation, media storage and delivery, feed generation for ordinary and very popular accounts, data modeling, caching, and defending trade-offs under heavy cross-questioning.
System DesignOnsite - OracleMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a rate limiter
This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design scalable, correct distributed rate limiting mechanisms, testing competencies in distributed systems, concurrency control, API gateway behavior, observability, and configurability within the System Design domain.
System DesignOnsite - OracleMediumSoftware EngineerDesign an Enterprise Remote Browser Isolation System
This problem tests the ability to architect a low-latency, secure isolation platform that bridges the gap between untrusted web content and enterprise endpoints.
System DesignOnsiteSecurityLow LatencyDistributed Systems - OracleMediumSoftware EngineerDesign an Internal Metrics Ingestion Service
Design a scalable internal metrics collection and storage platform capable of ingesting high-throughput time-series data from hundreds of thousands of hosts, decoupling ingestion from query workloads.
System DesignOnsiteTime SeriesDistributed SystemsTelemetry - OracleHardSoftware EngineerExplain your project system design
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 Explain your project system design states assumptions, handles edge cases, explains trade-offs, and shows how to validate the result clearly.
System DesignOnsite - OracleMediumSoftware EngineerFind Global and Rolling Top-K URLs Under a Memory Limit
Design a memory-bounded distributed analytics system to compute both global (all-time) and rolling 24-hour top-K accessed URLs from a high-throughput event stream.
System DesignOnsiteStream ProcessingTop-KDistributed Systems - OracleEasySite Reliability EngineerMonitor 100,000 GPU Hosts and Trigger Repair Workflows
This question tests the ability to design a distributed telemetry collection and automated incident remediation system for a large-scale hardware fleet.
System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsObservabilityAutomation - OscarMediumSoftware EngineerDesign Telehealth Consultation Queue
This question evaluates system design competency (Category: System Design), emphasizing distributed systems, queueing and matching logic, data modeling, API design, concurrency control, and regulatory compliance for constrained resource allocation.
System DesignOnsite - OtherMediumSoftware Engineer4.1 Design a Live Streaming Platform
This question evaluates a candidate's competency in large-scale system design, encompassing distributed systems, networking, storage, real-time processing, and scalability considerations specific to live video streaming.
System DesignOnsite - OtherMediumSoftware Engineer4.2 Design a Collaborative Document Editor
This question evaluates skills in designing real-time collaborative systems, including distributed-systems reasoning, conflict-resolution algorithms, real-time synchronization, presence and offline synchronization, and storage/versioning architecture.
System DesignOnsite - OtherMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Task Scheduler
Design a durable task scheduler with due-time indexing, atomic claims, worker leases, retry states, recurring occurrences, and clear duplicate-delivery semantics.
System DesignOnsite - Otter.AiMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Fault-Tolerant Meeting Bot Allocation System
Design the infrastructure between a web UI and a bot pool. Connect requirements and APIs to data modeling, consistency, scaling, failure recovery, observability, and the important design trade-offs.
System DesignOnsite - Otter.AiMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Google Docs-Style Real-Time Collaborative Editing Backend
Design the backend of a Google Docs-style editor in which many users edit the same document in real time and every copy converges to the same text. Tests concurrency control for simultaneous edits, routing of document sessions, operation storage and revision history, presence, and recovery from disconnects and server failures.
System DesignOnsite - PalantirEasySoftware EngineerDesign a Server Metrics Monitor
This question evaluates knowledge of distributed system design, scheduling and orchestration, concurrency, fault tolerance, and observability in the context of large-scale metric collection.
System DesignOnsite - PalantirMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a compliant multi-tenant analytics platform
This question tests the ability to design a secure, scalable multi-tenant analytics platform that enforces strict data isolation and fine-grained access control while maintaining rigorous audit trails.
System DesignOnsiteMulti-tenancySecurityABAC - Palo Alto NetworksMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Scheduler and Metrics Platform
This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design cloud-native distributed systems, covering job scheduling, lifecycle management, observability, persistence, resource-aware placement, retry semantics, and multi-tenant security for containerized workloads.
System DesignOnsite - Palo Alto NetworksEasySoftware EngineerDesign a device configuration system
This question evaluates system design and distributed systems competency, including API design, storage modeling, rollout workflows, operational behavior, and consistency trade-offs for device configuration management.
System DesignOnsite - ParafinHardSoftware EngineerDesign a loan application system
Design a loan application system 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 - ParafinHardSoftware EngineerDesign loan application system
This question evaluates architecture and systems engineering competencies related to building scalable, compliant financial platforms, including data modeling, API and event-driven workflow design, security, and regulatory integration.
System DesignOnsite - PayPalMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Cross-Border Money Transfer Service
This question evaluates proficiency in designing distributed, fault-tolerant payment systems with competencies in payments flows, exchange-rate management, compliance and regulatory constraints, transactional integrity, idempotency, scalability, reliability, and observability.
System DesignOnsite - PayPalMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Payment Fraud Detection Service
This system design question tests the ability to architect a real-time, low-latency fraud decisioning service that combines deterministic rule engines with machine learning model scores. It evaluates practical understanding of distributed systems trade-offs, feature store design, and safe model/rule deployment on a high-availability critical path.
System DesignOnsite - PayPalMediumData ScientistDesign elevator scheduling for small building
Design elevator scheduling for small building 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 - PinterestHardSoftware EngineerDesign Bulk CSV and Individual Record Updates with Reliable, Partitioned Processing
A system design question about letting customers update records individually and in bulk by uploading CSV files. It focuses on reliable asynchronous job processing, idempotent row application, partitioning large files and the underlying data, conflicts between the two write paths, and reporting row outcomes.
System DesignOnsite - PinterestHardSoftware EngineerDesign Comment Notifications with Viral-Pin Aggregation
Tests end-to-end system design for large-scale, bursty notification pipelines, focusing on stream processing, aggregation under viral traffic spikes, and reliable third-party push delivery.
System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsStream ProcessingMessage Queues - PinterestHardSoftware EngineerDesign Individual and Bulk Merchant Product Updates with Image Uploads
This problem tests the ability to design a distributed system capable of handling high-throughput asynchronous updates, atomic transactional integrity for partial batch failures, and robust image processing pipelines.
System DesignOnsiteAsynchronous ProcessingConcurrencyScalability - PinterestHardSoftware EngineerDesign Real-Time Search Autocomplete with Top-10 Popularity-Ranked Prefix Suggestions
Design a distributed search autocomplete system capable of returning the top 10 popularity-ranked queries for any prefix with sub-30ms latency. The problem evaluates your ability to handle massive read throughput, partition heavily skewed prefix workloads, and merge streaming popularity signals with batch historical baselines.
System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsSearchCaching - PinterestHardSoftware EngineerDesign a Google Photos–like service
This question evaluates proficiency in designing large-scale distributed media systems, testing competencies in distributed storage and caching, ingest pipelines, CDN-backed delivery, indexing/search, sync/conflict resolution, access control/privacy compliance, and cost/operational planning.
System DesignOnsite - PinterestMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Large-File Upload and Analysis Flow
Tests the ability to design an end-to-end media ingestion system supporting chunked resumable uploads, asynchronous analysis pipelines, idempotency, and real-time client notifications.
System DesignOnsitesystem-designcloud-storagedistributed-systems
Oracle
Otter.Ai
Palantir
Palo Alto Networks
PayPal
Pinterest