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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 721–750 of 1311 results

  • MicrosoftMediumSoftware Engineer
    Design a Ticketmaster-like ticketing system

    This problem tests your ability to design a high-concurrency reservation system that prevents overbooking while ensuring fairness and low latency during peak traffic.

    System DesignOnsiteConcurrencyDistributed SystemsScalability
  • MicrosoftMediumSoftware Engineer
    Design a To-Do List Service (CRUD, Auth, Rate Limiting, Caching & API Versioning)

    This question tests the ability to design a scalable, multi-tenant To-Do service, focusing on API versioning, authentication, rate limiting, and data integrity.

    System DesignTechnical ScreenAPI DesignCachingRate Limiting
  • MicrosoftMediumSoftware Engineer
    Design a URL Shortener (High-Level and Low-Level Design)

    This question tests the ability to design a distributed, scalable URL shortening service by addressing key generation strategies, storage schema, and caching policies.

    System DesignTechnical ScreenScalabilityDatabaseCaching
  • MicrosoftMediumSoftware Engineer
    Design a URL Shortening Service

    This question tests the ability to design a distributed, scalable system for mapping long URLs to short aliases, focusing on hash generation, storage strategy, and performance optimization.

    System DesignOnsiteScalabilityHashingCaching
  • MicrosoftMediumSoftware Engineer
    Design a Voice and Chat AI Receptionist Platform

    Design a multi-tenant voice/chat AI receptionist with approved knowledge, authorized actions, interruption handling, and real human conversation takeover.

    System DesignOnsite
  • MicrosoftMediumSoftware Engineer
    Design a Windows App Notification System While Working With an AI Assistant

    A system design exercise to design the Windows notification platform that lets many applications post, update and display notifications, completed with an AI assistant. It tests component design, isolation between apps, user controls and load handling, plus how well the candidate prompts, refines and critically evaluates AI output.

    System DesignOnsite
  • MicrosoftMediumSoftware Engineer
    Design a cloud console main page

    This question evaluates a candidate's understanding of designing a secure, multi-tenant cloud console main page, emphasizing authentication, authorization/permissions (including RBAC and scoped roles), audit logging, end-to-end request flow, and scaling for low-latency and high availability.

    System DesignOnsite
  • MicrosoftMediumSoftware Engineer
    Design a high-level logging system

    This System Design question evaluates a candidate's ability to design scalable, reliable centralized logging and observability infrastructure, covering distributed systems concepts such as ingestion, durable storage, querying/indexing, access control, and multi-tenant separation.

    System DesignTechnical Screen
  • MicrosoftMediumSoftware Engineer
    Design a high-scale URL shortener

    This problem tests your ability to design a distributed, highly available URL shortening service that manages massive read-heavy traffic and ensures low-latency redirection.

    System DesignOnsiteScalabilityCachingDistributed Systems
  • MicrosoftHardSoftware Engineer
    Design a job scheduler ETL pipeline system

    This question tests the ability to design a distributed, fault-tolerant job orchestration system capable of handling complex task dependencies, retries, and high-throughput data processing.

    System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsETLScalability
  • MicrosoftMediumSoftware Engineer
    Design a live sports score search feature with near-real-time score updates

    A system design exercise for a sports app's search feature that returns matching games with live, continuously updating scores. It probes requirement precision such as an explicit update-delay target, relational versus NoSQL storage choices, live update delivery, and high availability during traffic spikes.

    System DesignOnsite
  • MicrosoftMediumSoftware Engineer
    Design a pipeline that ingests a live data stream and powers real-time charts

    A high-level design question about ingesting a continuous stream of timestamped events and showing it on dashboards whose charts update live. It examines stream processing, aggregation and downsampling, late-event handling, storage for recent and historical data, and the ability to present a design clearly without a diagram.

    System DesignOnsite
  • MicrosoftHardSoftware Engineer
    Design a replicated cloud storage service

    This problem tests your ability to design a distributed, highly available object storage system by addressing metadata management, data consistency, and replication strategies.

    System DesignTechnical ScreenDistributed SystemsStorageReplication
  • MicrosoftMediumSoftware Engineer
    Design a replicated key-value store with quorums

    This question evaluates understanding of replication, quorum protocols, data partitioning, consistency models, failure detection and recovery, and conflict resolution in distributed key–value stores.

    System DesignOnline Assessment
  • MicrosoftHardSoftware Engineer
    Design a simple API rate limiter

    This problem tests the ability to design a distributed rate-limiting service that maintains low latency and high accuracy across multiple application server instances.

    System DesignOnsiteScalabilityCachingDistributed Systems
  • MicrosoftHardSoftware Engineer
    Design a typeahead search service

    This question evaluates competency in large-scale system design, including scalable data modeling, low-latency prefix lookup, ranking and personalization strategies, API design, caching, and trade-off analysis.

    System DesignTechnical Screen
  • MicrosoftMediumSoftware Engineer
    Design an Ad Impression Reconciliation and Aggregation Service

    This problem tests the ability to design a distributed, idempotent pipeline that reconciles inconsistent event streams into a consistent, aggregated state for billing and analytics.

    System DesignTechnical ScreenDistributed SystemsData PipelinesIdempotency
  • MicrosoftMediumSoftware Engineer
    Design an Event Booking System

    This question tests the ability to design a high-concurrency booking system, focusing on preventing double-bookings, managing seat availability, and ensuring atomic transactions.

    System DesignOnsiteConcurrencyDistributed SystemsDatabase Modeling
  • MicrosoftMediumSoftware Engineer
    Design an Online Tic-Tac-Toe Service with REST-Only APIs, Matchmaking and Multi-Region

    Design an online two-player Tic-Tac-Toe service where clients may only use REST APIs, with online matchmaking, scalability and expansion to multiple regions. It tests server-authoritative game state, propagating moves without server push, race-free player pairing, and deciding which data stays region-local.

    System DesignOnsite
  • MicrosoftHardSoftware Engineer
    Design an image upload/download service

    This question evaluates a candidate's competency in system design, distributed storage and processing, API design, scalability, security, reliability, and observability for production-grade services.

    System DesignOnsite
  • MicrosoftMediumSoftware Engineer
    Design an online ticket booking system

    This question tests the ability to design a distributed system that manages high-concurrency inventory, specifically focusing on consistency models, race condition prevention during seat selection, and reliable payment processing.

    System DesignTechnical ScreenConcurrencyDistributed SystemsScalability
  • MicrosoftMediumMachine Learning Engineer
    Design chat and online chess

    This problem tests your ability to design a distributed system that supports low-latency, real-time interactions for both chat messaging and synchronized game state for a chess platform.

    System DesignOnsiteWebSocketsScalabilityConcurrency
  • MicrosoftMediumSoftware Engineer
    Design device telemetry pipeline for real-time and batch

    This question evaluates a candidate's competency in distributed systems architecture, data engineering, and operational trade-offs involved in designing telemetry pipelines that support both near-real-time and batch analytics.

    System DesignOnline Assessment
  • MicrosoftMediumSoftware Engineer
    Design read-heavy org chart subordinate counts

    Evaluates understanding of tree/graph data modeling, dynamic indexing, and consistency and concurrency control for maintaining aggregate subordinate counts under updates; Category/Domain: System Design.

    System DesignOnsite
  • MicrosoftMediumSoftware Engineer
    Design streaming error-log counting with moving average

    This question evaluates understanding of real-time stream processing concepts such as event filtering, stateful per-service counting, sliding-window moving averages, late-event handling, scalability, and fault-tolerant state management for monitoring and alerting.

    System DesignOnline Assessment
  • MicrosoftMediumSoftware Engineer
    Experimentation Platform: Sync vs Async Validation, Latency Budgets and Health Checks

    A senior experimentation-platform deep dive that asks which validations should block versus run in the background, how variant assignment stays inside callers' latency budgets, and which health checks catch broken experiments. It tests trade-off reasoning about online A/B testing infrastructure.

    System DesignTechnical Screen
  • MicrosoftMediumSoftware Engineer
    Peer-to-Peer File Distribution: Discovery, Chunked Transfer and Integrity Checks

    A system design interview question asking you to build a peer-to-peer file sharing network where users download large files directly from other users. It tests content identification, peer discovery, chunked parallel transfer with integrity checks, NAT traversal, incentives against free-riders, and keeping files available as peers churn.

    System DesignOnsite
  • MintlifyMediumSoftware Engineer
    Design a Collaborative Editor

    Design a real-time collaborative editor around explicit merge semantics, streamed operations, journals, snapshots, reconnect, and Git milestones.

    System DesignOnsite
  • MithrilMediumSoftware Engineer
    Design a hybrid-cloud GPU allocation service

    This question evaluates system-design competency in distributed resource management, hybrid-cloud scheduling, GPU allocation, multi-tenant fairness, reliability, security, API design, and observability within the system design domain.

    System DesignOnsite
  • MolocoHardSoftware Engineer
    Design Search Autocomplete

    This question evaluates system design skills for building a large-scale, low-latency autocomplete service, including distributed architecture, indexing and ranking strategies, caching, ingestion pipelines, sharding, and operational trade-offs.

    System DesignOnsite