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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
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- 11
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Showing 691–720 of 1311 results
- MetaHardData EngineerDesign batch and streaming ETL architecture
Design batch and streaming ETL architecture 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 - MetaMediumSoftware EngineerDesign coding platform with global leaderboard
This question tests the ability to design a high-throughput, real-time leaderboard system that balances strong consistency for rankings with the scalability required for a global user base.
System DesignOnsiteScalabilityCachingDatabase Partitioning - MetaHardSoftware EngineerDesign input validation and error handling
A Meta software engineer system design technical screen: design the API and system-level input validation and error-handling strategy for a service that computes the top-k most frequent elements in a posted array. The merged answer covers the request/response contract with a worked example, payload and cardinality limits, layered validation across client, gateway and service, authentication, rate limiting, idempotency, timeouts and retries, the full 4xx/5xx error taxonomy with sample error responses, partial-failure modes, graceful degradation to approximate top-k with stated error bounds, defenses against compression bombs and poisoned payloads, observability, and a test and production monitoring plan.
System DesignTechnical Screen - MetaMediumSoftware EngineerDesign real-time live comments
This question evaluates the candidate's ability to design scalable, low‑latency real‑time messaging systems, focusing on high‑fanout delivery, approximate time ordering, moderation and rate‑limiting mechanisms, and replay of recent events.
System DesignOnsite - MetaHardMachine Learning EngineerDesign scalable media storage and delivery
This question evaluates an engineer's ability to design globally distributed, highly scalable media storage and delivery systems, covering competencies in object storage and metadata modeling, CDN integration, replication and consistency strategies, security and access control, background processing, observability, quotas, and cost/performance trade-offs. It is commonly asked in system design interviews to assess reasoning about durability, availability, latency and cost trade-offs while requiring both high-level architectural thinking and practical implementation details; category: System Design; level of abstraction: combines conceptual architecture with practical application considerations.
System DesignOnsite - MetaHardSoftware EngineerDesign searchable status & geolocation services
Design searchable status & geolocation services 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 - MetaHardData EngineerDesign tables for event-driven metrics
This question evaluates relational data modeling and data engineering competencies for high-volume event analytics, including schema design, partitioning and clustering strategies, duplicate and late-arriving event handling, and normalization versus denormalization trade-offs.
System DesignTechnical Screen - MetaMediumSoftware EngineerDesign the Frontend Data Flow and APIs for a Social Media News Feed
A product architecture design problem: starting from a feed mock-up, design the client data flow and APIs for a social news feed on web and mobile. It tests UX flow analysis, the shape of the feed response object, cursor-based pagination, and edge cases across client types.
System DesignOnsite - MetaMediumSoftware EngineerDesign ticketing system with seat hold
This question evaluates a candidate's skills in system design, distributed systems, concurrency control, data modeling, and scalability, testing their ability to reason about correctness and performance under high contention and heavy traffic as well as trade-offs between consistency and availability.
System DesignOnsite - MetaHardData EngineerEvaluate impact of short videos in feed
This question evaluates competency in metrics definition, causal experimentation, product analytics, and feed system behavior within the System Design and Data Engineering domain.
System DesignOnsite - MetaHardSoftware EngineerFind Nearby High Scores in a Large Game Leaderboard
Design a high-scale gaming leaderboard service capable of real-time score updates, deterministic tie-breaking, friend-filtered leaderboards, and efficient "nearby competitor" queries under extreme write loads.
System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsIn-Memory CachingLeaderboard - MetaHardSoftware EngineerMerge customers and preserve history
A Meta software-engineer system-design take-home: implement mergeCustomers(oldId, newId) for a payments/ledger platform, absorbing one customer into another while preserving every account's balance and immutable transaction history. Tests identity unification, ownership remap, conflict/duplicate resolution, top-N leaderboard maintenance, atomicity, concurrency, idempotency, and complexity analysis.
System DesignOnline Assessment - MetaMediumSoftware EngineerScale a Cache or Rate Limiter Across Multiple Machines
Tests your ability to design a horizontally scalable distributed rate limiter and caching layer, focusing on data partitioning, hot-key mitigation, failure modes, and consistency trade-offs.
System DesignOnsitesystem-designdistributed-systemsrate-limiting - MetaMediumSoftware EngineerTroubleshoot a single-node web outage
This question tests your ability to diagnose a sudden service outage on a single-node web server and your ability to propose architectural changes to prevent future single points of failure.
System DesignTechnical ScreenTroubleshootingAvailabilitySRE - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerDesign A Low-Latency Product Price Update API
Prepare for a read-heavy product pricing system design interview where prices update infrequently but launch-page reads must be low latency. The prompt focuses on versioned price records, caching, bulk reads, invalidation, rollback, and consistency after daily updates.
System DesignOnsite - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerDesign A Scalable Web Crawler
This question evaluates scalable system architecture and distributed systems competencies, specifically testing web crawler concepts such as URL discovery and deduplication, scheduling and prioritization, politeness-aware fetching, parsing and link extraction, storage of content and metadata, failure handling, and monitoring.
System DesignTechnical Screen - MicrosoftEasySoftware EngineerDesign Anonymous Product Sharing with Every-Nth Visitor Rewards
Design product pages and trackable sharing links with anonymous-visitor limits, atomic every-Nth rewards, recoverable redemption, and engagement analytics.
System DesignOnsite - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerDesign Food-Delivery Proximity Search for Restaurants Within 10 km
A system design exercise to build proximity search for a food-delivery app that finds restaurants within 10 km of a customer, followed by hand-coding the core lookup. It tests geospatial indexing, read and write paths, partitioning, handling dense areas, and turning a design into correct code.
System DesignOnsite - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerDesign User Re-engagement Notifications
This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design end-to-end re-engagement and reminder notification systems, assessing competencies in system architecture, data modeling, scheduling and delivery pipelines, reminder extraction from natural language, user preferences, rate limiting, metrics, privacy, reliability, and scalability.
System DesignOnsite - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a ChatGPT-like serving system
This question tests the ability to design a scalable, low-latency LLM inference system, focusing on request handling, KV-cache optimization, and horizontal scaling strategies.
System DesignTechnical ScreenLLMScalabilityInference - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Distributed Key-Value Store
Tests your ability to architect a highly available, horizontally scalable distributed key-value store, evaluating core concepts including consistent hashing, tunable quorum consistency, storage engine trade-offs, and failure recovery.
System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsKey-Value StoreConsistent Hashing - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Global One-to-One Voice Calling System
Design global one-to-one voice calls with device registration, signaling, accept/reject races, media negotiation, relay fallback, and mobile recovery.
System DesignOnsite - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a High-Concurrency Incident Ticket Correlation Platform
Design a scalable incident ticket correlation and management system capable of handling high-volume alert storms, maintaining interval-based status history, and performing asynchronous, idempotent incident deduplication and linking.
System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsEvent-DrivenData Modeling - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a High-Volume Log Storage System with Live Tailing of Growing Files
Design a storage system that ingests a massive stream of log records into files and serves reads, including readers following files that are still being written. It probes partitioning, metadata for locating data across nodes, batching for write throughput, position-based live delivery, and the cost of long-lived reader connections at scale.
System DesignOnsite - MicrosoftEasySoftware EngineerDesign a Lab Machine Fleet Monitor: Payload Dispatch, Hang Detection, and Remote Reboot
Design a system that dispatches compute payloads to lab machines that poll for work and shows on a central dashboard whether each payload is downloading, running, completed, crashed, or hung. It tests agent design, hang detection, crash and hang logs, authorized reboot and power cycle, reruns after interruption, and refreshable machine inventory.
System DesignOnsite - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Real-Time Bike-Sharing System With Reservations and Live Tracking
A system design exercise for a real-time bike-sharing service where riders find nearby bikes, reserve and unlock them, and end trips by locking. It tests gathering requirements first, choosing location reporting rates, keeping telemetry writes off the transactional database, and making reservations correct under contention.
System DesignOnsite - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Real-Time Collaborative Document Editor with Concurrent Editing
A senior-level system design prompt asking for a browser-based document editor where many people edit the same file at once, similar to Google Docs. It tests concurrency control for simultaneous edits, real-time sync, durable storage with version history, sharing permissions, and how the service scales and recovers from failures.
System DesignOther - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Role-Based Access Control System With Fast Checks and Bounded Revocation
A senior system design question about a role-based access control system with roles, permissions, scoped assignments and inheritance, plus a permission check on every protected request. It tests data modeling, fast check evaluation, caching with a bounded revocation delay, behavior on failure, and auditing of changes.
System DesignOnsite - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Secure Copilot API
This question evaluates proficiency in designing secure, multi-tenant API systems with emphasis on authentication and authorization models, token lifecycle management, threat mitigation (such as replay attacks, token theft, and misuse), access control across tenants and tools, and scalability and reliability concerns.
System DesignOnsite - MicrosoftMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Shared Proxy Layer That Cuts Microservices' API Call Costs
System design question about a shared proxy layer that lowers what microservices spend calling metered API endpoints. It tests placement choices, response caching, collapsing duplicate requests, batching, quotas and budgets, safe retries for writes, failure policies and per-service cost attribution.
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