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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 541–570 of 1311 results
- HubSpotEasySoftware EngineerDesign an hourly weather crawling service
This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design scalable, reliable data ingestion and delivery systems, covering competencies such as scheduling and crawling, data normalization, storage schema design, idempotent ingestion, rate limiting, retries, and monitoring.
System DesignOnsite - HubSpotMediumSoftware EngineerSchedule and execute future payments
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 Schedule and execute future payments states assumptions, handles edge cases, explains trade-offs, and shows how to validate the result clearly.
System DesignOnline Assessment - IBMHardSoftware EngineerDesign a multithreaded CPU 1D convolution
An IBM software-engineer take-home that asks you to design and implement a multithreaded CPU version of valid 1D convolution across three regimes: a tiny kernel (K=3), a kernel as long as the input (K=N, a single dot product), and a 100-thread cap. It evaluates parallel decomposition, scheduling, cache locality, false-sharing avoidance, SIMD vectorization, and reduction/synchronization choices.
System DesignOnline Assessment - IllumioMediumSoftware EngineerDesign Multicloud Publishing and API Gateway
This question tests the ability to design a distributed system that reliably replicates data from a primary database to multiple cloud providers while exposing a unified, secure API gateway for external consumers.
System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsAPI GatewayCDC - IllumioHardSoftware EngineerDesign a Time-Series Database
This problem tests the ability to architect a high-throughput, horizontally scalable system for time-series data, balancing ingest performance with efficient range-query capability.
System DesignOnsiteTime-SeriesDistributed SystemsIndexing - ImcMediumSoftware EngineerDesign an in-memory hotel booking system
This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design in-memory data models, concurrency control mechanisms, and temporal reservation logic for booking systems.
System DesignTechnical Screen - InstacartMediumBackend EngineerDesign Idempotent Due-Date and Hold Notifications
Design idempotent library notifications for upcoming and current due dates plus FIFO hold availability. Use stable business-event identities, transactional scheduling, atomic recipient claims, state rechecks, retries, reconciliation, and clear frontend distinctions among holds, offers, and checkouts.
System DesignOnline Assessment - InstacartMediumSoftware EngineerDesign Idempotent In-App Availability and Due-Date Notifications
Design asynchronous in-app availability alerts and due-date reminders with Celery, Redis, durable idempotency, versioned schedules, and crash recovery.
System DesignOnline Assessment - InstacartMediumSoftware EngineerDesign an Inventory Service with Reservations, Hot SKUs and Oversell Prevention
A system design question about an inventory management service that reserves stock while customers check out. It tests how a candidate prevents overselling under concurrent updates, handles hot SKUs, manages reservation expiry and idempotency, and supports partial fulfillment of multi-item orders.
System DesignOnsite - InstacartMediumSoftware EngineerDesign an Inventory Service with Stock Reservations That Prevents Overselling
A system design discussion of an inventory service that reserves stock for orders, centered on reservations, concurrent updates and preventing overselling. It probes how stock and holds are modeled, how a reservation stays atomic under contention, how abandoned holds are released and how hot items scale.
System DesignTechnical Screen - InstacartMediumSoftware EngineerDesign an inventory management system
This question evaluates competency in system design, data modeling, distributed consistency, concurrency control, API design, idempotency, and scalability for backend inventory and reservation workflows.
System DesignOnsite - InstacartMediumSoftware EngineerDesign an inventory system
This question evaluates a candidate's competency in designing inventory and distributed systems, covering stock tracking models, reservation and commit semantics, concurrency control, data modeling, API design, and real-time integrations.
System DesignHR Screen - InstacartMediumSoftware EngineerDesign and Release a Consistent Dark-Store Inventory System
Design a strongly consistent micro-fulfillment (dark-store) inventory system that handles reservations, stock reconciliation, and idempotent retries, alongside a zero-downtime deployment strategy.
System DesignOnsitesystem-designdistributed-transactionsinventory-management - InstacartHardSoftware EngineerDesign cloud storage with quotas and compression
This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design a multi-tenant cloud storage system, testing competencies in API design, quota accounting, compression strategies, distributed storage architecture (partitioning, replication/erasure coding), consistency models, security, versioning, and observability.
System DesignOnline Assessment - InstacartHardSoftware EngineerDesign product catalog service
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 product catalog service states assumptions, handles edge cases, explains trade-offs, and shows how to validate the result clearly.
System DesignOnsite - InstacartHardSoftware EngineerDesign scalable inventory system and avoid races
This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design scalable, highly available distributed systems with robust concurrency control and consistency reasoning, covering architecture, data modeling, caching, message-based integration, and operational concerns like observability and disaster recovery.
System DesignOnsite - InstacartMediumSoftware EngineerReserve Cart Inventory Without Overselling
Design a high-throughput inventory reservation system that locks stock when items are added to a cart, prevents overselling during flash promotions, handles automatic reservation expiration, and scales seamlessly under a 10x traffic spike.
System DesignOnsitesystem-designdistributed-systemsconcurrency - InstacartHardSoftware EngineerTroubleshoot a production incident end-to-end
Troubleshoot a production incident end-to-end 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 - IntuitMediumSoftware EngineerScale a service you just built: schema trade-offs, new features, indexes, and search
System design deep dive on scaling a service built earlier in the same interview loop. Compare schema options, extend the data model for reviews, ratings, and keyword search, and reason about query performance, indexing, pagination, and when a dedicated search engine is worth adding.
System DesignOnsite - J.P. MorganMediumSoftware Engineer IIDesign Secure Token Authorization and Large-File Transfer
Design a secure, enterprise-grade file transfer service that supports resumable multi-gigabyte uploads/downloads alongside fine-grained, token-based authorization and key management.
System DesignOnsitesystem-designsecuritydistributed-systems - J.P. MorganMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Rate Limiter: Algorithm Trade-offs, Scalability and Availability
A high-level design question on a rate limiter that compares common limiting algorithms and then scales the chosen one across many servers while staying available. It tests trade-off reasoning about accuracy, memory, burst handling, shared state, and what happens when the limiter's own dependencies fail.
System DesignOnsite - J.P. MorganMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Reliable Bank Payment System
Design a reliable bank payment system that remains correct across retries, crashes, duplicate requests, and ambiguous external-rail timeouts. Define idempotent APIs, a durable state machine and ledger, transactional handoff, safe reconciliation, invariant monitoring, auditability, and operator remediation.
System DesignOnsite - J.P. MorganMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Scalable Notification System
This question assesses the ability to design a distributed, asynchronous notification system capable of handling high-throughput multi-channel messaging while maintaining strict delivery guarantees and rate-limiting policies.
System DesignOnsiteScalabilityMessage QueuesDistributed Systems - J.P. MorganMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a URL shortener
This question assesses the ability to design a distributed URL shortening service, focusing on database schema design, collision resolution, and caching strategies for high-read throughput.
System DesignTechnical ScreenCachingDatabasesHashing - J.P. MorganEasySoftware EngineerDesign an Auditable Internal AI Chatbot
Design an enterprise RAG-based AI assistant that enforces role-based document access control, bounds conversation history, mitigates prompt injection, and maintains an immutable, compliance-grade audit trail.
System DesignTechnical ScreenRAGSecurityCompliance - J.P. MorganMediumSoftware EngineerDesign an E-Commerce Shopping Website
This problem tests your ability to design a scalable, consistent backend architecture for an e-commerce platform, focusing on inventory management, order processing, and high-read traffic handling.
System DesignTechnical ScreenScalabilityDatabaseMicroservices - J.P. MorganMediumMachine Learning EngineerDesign an Entitlement-Aware Agentic Portfolio Workflow
This problem tests the ability to architect an LLM-based agentic system that balances autonomous task execution with strict role-based access control (RBAC) and auditability.
System DesignTechnical ScreenAgentic WorkflowSecurityLLM - J.P. MorganMediumSoftware Engineer IIExplain a Project Architecture End to End
Tests your ability to present a production system architecture end-to-end, detailing data flow, ownership boundaries, database indexing and partitioning strategies, resilience patterns, and concrete architectural trade-offs.
System DesignOnsiteDatabase OptimizationArchitectureData Modeling - J.P. MorganEasySoftware EngineerImprove shopping cart latency and stock notifications
This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design scalable, low-latency e-commerce architectures and real-time notification mechanisms while reasoning about data consistency, concurrency control, and correctness under high traffic (including concerns like avoiding oversells).
System DesignOnline Assessment - J.P. MorganMediumSoftware Engineer IIOptimize User-and-Region Queries on a Million-Row Table
Evaluate and design database access patterns, indexing strategies, and scaling techniques (partitioning, sharding, replication) for a financial user-profile system with high regional skew and frequent lookups.
System DesignOnsiteDatabase OptimizationIndexingPartitioning
HubSpot
IBM
Imc
Instacart
Intuit
J.P. Morgan