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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 31–60 of 721 results
- AmazonHardSoftware EngineerDesign a URL shortening platform
This question evaluates competency in system design and distributed systems architecture, including API design, scalable short-code generation, data modeling and storage/sharding, caching and CDN strategies, consistency and fault-tolerance trade-offs, rate limiting and abuse prevention, analytics, compliance, and capacity planning.
System DesignOnsite - AmazonHardSoftware EngineerDesign a configuration subscription service
This question evaluates skills in designing a distributed configuration and subscription service, covering API design, real-time notification semantics (delivery and ordering guarantees), versioning, concurrency and thread-safety, durability and recovery, multi-tenant isolation, security, and scalability concerns.
System DesignOnsite - AmazonHardSoftware EngineerDesign a distributed job scheduler service
This question tests the ability to design a distributed, fault-tolerant system capable of scheduling and executing tasks at a massive scale with strict latency requirements.
System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsScalabilityScheduling - AmazonHardSoftware EngineerDesign a file search module like UNIX find
This question evaluates object-oriented and API design skills, filesystem semantics (pattern matching, file types, timestamps, permissions, symlink handling), traversal and concurrency strategies, and robustness for large or error-prone directory trees.
System DesignOnsite - AmazonMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a multi-size storage locker system
This question tests your ability to design a scalable, distributed reservation system that handles resource allocation (bin packing) under concurrency constraints.
System DesignOnsiteConcurrencyAPI DesignDistributed Systems - AmazonMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a scalable image-based social network
This question tests your ability to design a distributed system architecture capable of handling high-volume image uploads, metadata storage, and low-latency feed retrieval.
System DesignOnsiteScalabilityDistributed SystemsCaching - AmazonMediumApplied ScientistDesign an S3-like object storage service
This question evaluates understanding of distributed systems, object storage architecture, REST API design, multipart upload semantics, replication and durability strategies, failure recovery, and scalability concerns.
System DesignOnsite - AmazonHardSoftware EngineerDesign an online bookstore for browse and purchase
Design an online bookstore for browse and purchase 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 - AmazonHardSoftware EngineerDesign delayed job scheduler (LLD)
This question evaluates system design and distributed-systems competencies, including scheduling algorithms, durable persistence and recovery, concurrency control, delivery semantics, and operational concerns, and it belongs to the System Design category.
System DesignOnsite - AmazonHardSoftware EngineerDesign document-tag classes with concurrency safety
Design document-tag classes with concurrency safety 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 - AmazonMediumSoftware EngineerDesign globally consistent metadata service
This question tests the ability to design a globally distributed metadata service that requires strict consistency for frequent read/write operations across multiple geographic regions.
System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsConsistencyScalability - AmazonMediumSoftware EngineerDesign multi-tenant ingestion and processing platform
This question tests the ability to design a multi-tenant data platform that ensures resource fairness, performance isolation, and cost attribution at scale.
System DesignOnsiteMulti-tenancyScalabilityDistributed Systems - AmazonHardSoftware EngineerDesign ride-hailing pricing with fairness and pooling
This question evaluates system design and algorithmic skills related to real-time distributed pricing, API and data-flow architecture, carpooling logic, fairness constraints, and experimentation support.
System DesignOnsite - AmazonMediumSoftware EngineerHigh Availability and Failover for a Primary-Replica Database
This problem tests your ability to design a resilient database architecture that minimizes downtime and data loss during node failures.
System DesignOnsiteDatabaseHigh AvailabilityReplication - AmazonMediumSoftware EngineerMeasure platform success and drive adoption
This question assesses your ability to design a telemetry and feedback system for an internal developer platform to measure adoption, identify friction points, and drive cross-team migration.
System DesignOnsiteTelemetryDeveloper ExperienceMetrics - AmazonMediumSoftware EngineerReview an existing architecture for risks
This question tests the ability to analyze a distributed system architecture for single points of failure, scalability bottlenecks, and operational risks, while balancing engineering trade-offs.
System DesignOnsiteScalabilityReliabilityArchitecture - AmperityHardSoftware EngineerDesign an Online SQL Query Service over Apache Iceberg Tables
Design an online service that runs user-submitted SQL statements against data stored in Apache Iceberg tables. Covers the query lifecycle and API, metadata-driven planning with snapshots and manifests, distributed execution, multi-tenant admission control, commits for writes, and table maintenance.
System DesignOnsite - Anchorage DigitalMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Digital Asset Custody Service
This question tests your ability to design a high-security, distributed system for managing digital asset custody, focusing on secure key storage, transaction authorization, and auditability.
System DesignOnsiteSecurityBlockchainDistributed Systems - AnthropicHardMachine Learning EngineerDeploy a Large Model to GPU Workers
Design a high-throughput, fault-tolerant artifact distribution system to deploy a 500 GB large language model across thousands of GPU worker nodes under strict time and bandwidth constraints.
System DesignOnsiteML InfrastructureDistributed SystemsNetworking - AnthropicMediumSoftware EngineerDescribe a Python design-and-coding approach in Colab
This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design and implement a Python-based solution within a cloud-hosted notebook environment, covering requirements elicitation, component and data-structure selection, modularization, testing, dependency and environment management, and basic performance analysis.
System DesignOnsite - AnthropicMediumSoftware EngineerDesign Instagram (Feed, Photos, and Friend Recommendations)
Design a scalable social media platform supporting photo uploads, timeline feed generation, follow graphs, and friend recommendations. This problem tests distributed storage, feed fan-out strategies under skewed follower distributions, and graph-based recommendation systems.
System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsCachingFeed Generation - AnthropicMediumSoftware EngineerDesign One-to-One Chat
This question evaluates expertise in designing scalable, real-time one-to-one messaging systems, testing knowledge of distributed systems principles, message persistence and retrieval, delivery semantics, session and WebSocket management, ordering, retries, deduplication, and trade-offs between streaming and in-memory technologies such as Kafka and Redis. It is commonly asked to assess architectural reasoning about latency, availability, ordering guarantees and reliability within the System Design domain, and requires a mix of conceptual architectural understanding and practical implementation-level considerations.
System DesignOnsite - AnthropicHardSoftware EngineerDesign a Batched LLM Inference Service Assuming Each Batch Takes 100 ms
A system design question on serving large language model inference by batching requests, given the interviewer's assumption that every batch finishes in 100 ms. It tests batching policy, capacity math, latency budgets, returning results to callers, failure handling, and whether a fixed batch time holds when prompt and response lengths vary.
System DesignOnsite - AnthropicMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Collaborative Prompt Playground
Design a collaborative prompt playground with conflict-aware editing, immutable versions, asynchronous model runs, and reliable input and result provenance.
System DesignOnsite - AnthropicHardSoftware EngineerDesign a Concurrent Image Processing Service
Design a resilient, distributed image-processing pipeline that safely scales from a single worker to hundreds of concurrent nodes while guaranteeing job lease safety, idempotent output writes, and clean cancellation.
System DesignOnsitesystem-designdistributed-systemsconcurrency - AnthropicMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Distributed Rate Limiter
Tests the candidate's ability to design a low-latency, highly available distributed rate-limiting service that coordinates shared state across geographically distributed API gateways while gracefully handling network partitions and datastore failures.
System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsRate LimitingRedis - AnthropicHardMachine Learning EngineerDesign a Dynamically Batched Inference API
Design a scalable, multi-tenant LLM inference serving platform that balances Time-to-First-Token (TTFT) and throughput using dynamic iteration-level batching, KV cache memory management, and strict admission control.
System DesignOnsiteLLM ServingDistributed SystemsInference Engine - AnthropicMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Model Inference API and Optimize Its GPU Usage
A system design interview question that asks you to design an inference API for a trained model served on GPUs, covering the public API, streamed responses, request queueing, scheduling onto GPU workers, overload handling and failure recovery. Follow-up questions probe how to raise GPU throughput and memory efficiency without missing latency targets.
System DesignOnsite - AnthropicMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Parallel and Resumable Model Downloader
Design a parallel model downloader with version-bound byte ranges, resumable verified pieces, bounded resource use, and atomic publication of complete artifacts.
System DesignOnsite - AnthropicMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Resumable Parallel Downloader for Game Client Patches
Design a game launcher's patch downloader that fetches a multi-gigabyte update in parallel byte-range chunks, survives crashes and connection drops without re-downloading verified bytes, and only ever exposes a complete, verified patch to the game client.
System DesignOnsitedistributed-systemsresumabilityintegrity
Amazon
Anthropic