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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 61–90 of 517 results
- AnthropicHardSoftware EngineerIdentify and mitigate deduplication program risks
This question evaluates understanding of system design and practical engineering competencies required for building resilient file deduplication tools, covering filesystem semantics, error handling, hashing and collision considerations, concurrency, performance bottlenecks, cross-platform interoperability, and safety trade-offs.
System DesignTechnical Screen - AnthropicMediumMachine Learning EngineerOptimize MapReduce performance
This question evaluates understanding of the MapReduce programming model and distributed batch processing at scale. It tests practical knowledge of parallel efficiency, network bottleneck analysis, and optimization techniques like combiners, partitioning, and speculative execution — core competencies assessed in machine learning and data engineering roles.
System DesignTechnical Screen - AnthropicHardSoftware EngineerScale crawler with thread pool
This question evaluates system design and concurrent programming competencies, focusing on bounded thread-pool architecture, thread-safe frontier and deduplication structures, per-host politeness and in-flight limits, reliability mechanisms (timeouts, retries, backoff), and graceful shutdown and termination semantics.
System DesignTechnical Screen - AppleMediumSoftware EngineerCloud Provider Design for Provisioning Resources Through Terraform
A cloud infrastructure design question asking what a cloud provider must build so customers can create, update and destroy its resources with Terraform. It tests mapping the Terraform resource lifecycle to provider APIs, handling long-running operations and their status, idempotent retries, and drift detection.
System DesignTechnical Screen - AppleEasySoftware EngineerDesign APIs for a Voting System
Define APIs and a core model for an authenticated election with one final ballot per voter and results hidden until close. The design discussion covers eligibility, deterministic timing, idempotent voting, concurrent submissions, recountable records, audit trails, and privacy boundaries.
System DesignTechnical Screen - AppleMediumSoftware EngineerDesign Disk-Based Inventory Serving
This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design disk-based inventory services under tight RAM constraints, focusing on data layout, indexing strategies, caching, write/read paths, conditional updates, concurrency control, and I/O-latency trade-offs.
System DesignTechnical Screen - AppleMediumData EngineerDesign TikTok Data Engineering Systems
This problem tests the ability to design an end-to-end data pipeline for high-throughput mobile app event logging, focusing on ingestion, transformation, and storage optimization.
System DesignTechnical ScreenData PipelinesDistributed SystemsOLAP - AppleMediumMachine Learning EngineerDesign a multimodal RAG assistant
This question evaluates system design and machine learning engineering skills for building a multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) assistant, covering competencies in data ingestion and preprocessing across modalities, indexing and retrieval strategies, embeddings and re-ranking, grounding/prompting with citations, and evaluation and failure-mode mitigation. It is commonly asked to gauge an engineer's ability to architect scalable, grounded QA pipelines that balance retrieval quality, latency, and cost; it sits in the System Design domain and tests both high-level architectural reasoning and practical implementation considerations.
System DesignTechnical Screen - AppleMediumSoftware EngineerDesign an Accurate Click Aggregator
This question tests the ability to design a high-throughput, fault-tolerant system for tracking ad clicks while ensuring exactly-once processing or deduplication at scale.
System DesignTechnical ScreenScalabilityData PipelineDeduplication - AppleHardSoftware EngineerImplement a robust REST API method
Implement a robust REST API method 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 DesignTechnical Screen - AppleHardSoftware EngineerMigrate a monolithic wallet to microservices
This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design and plan a safe, compliant migration of a high-scale digital wallet from a monolithic architecture to microservices, covering service decomposition, data ownership, transactional consistency, security and key management, compliance, observability, and deployment strategies.
System DesignTechnical Screen - AppleMediumSoftware EngineerRedesign an Existing Relational Database to Reduce Read Latency
A staff-level screen question about an existing service whose normalized relational database serves slow reads: explain how you would change the data model and read path to cut read latency. Tests diagnosis of slow reads, trade-offs between read cost, write cost and data freshness, and safe rollout on a live system.
System DesignTechnical Screen - AppleMediumSoftware EngineerScale Digit-Square Convergence Requests
This question evaluates a candidate's competency in designing scalable, low-latency distributed services that combine algorithmic optimization and caching to handle massive request volumes for a numerical convergence operation.
System DesignTechnical Screen - Applied IntuitionMediumSoftware EngineerDesign Sensor Data Processing With AI-Assisted Implementation
Design an end-to-end ingestion, validation, and storage pipeline for high-frequency sensor telemetry from autonomous vehicle fleets. The focus is on handling raw versus derived data, schema modeling, fast time-range queries, and robust validation.
System DesignTechnical ScreenTime SeriesData PipelineIoT & Robotics - Applied IntuitionHardSoftware EngineerDiscuss productionizing event-timeout detector
Discuss productionizing event-timeout detector 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 DesignTechnical Screen - Applied IntuitionHardSoftware EngineerWalk through a recent project design
This question evaluates the candidate's proficiency in end-to-end system design—covering requirements definition, architecture and component design, data modeling, scalability, trade-off analysis, and operational readiness—within the System Design domain for a software engineer role.
System DesignTechnical Screen - ApplovinHardSoftware EngineerDesign UberPool matching with zero Manhattan detour
This question evaluates system design and algorithmic reasoning for constrained spatio-temporal matching and routing, covering Manhattan-distance geometry, matching algorithms, API and data model design, and scalability/consistency considerations.
System DesignTechnical Screen - AsanaMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Real-Time Like Counter for Collaborative Tasks
This problem tests the ability to design a distributed, high-concurrency counter system that maintains strict consistency while ensuring low-latency updates for collaborative task management.
System DesignTechnical ScreenDistributed SystemsRedisConcurrency - AsanaMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Twitter-like microblogging service
This question evaluates system design competencies including scalable architecture, data and API modeling, feed generation trade-offs, storage and caching strategies, consistency expectations, and operational concerns such as rate limiting, abuse mitigation, and observability.
System DesignTechnical Screen - AtlassianEasySoftware EngineerDesign a Data Stream Processor
This question tests your ability to design a scalable, reliable stream processing pipeline capable of ingesting, filtering, and persisting real-time events while managing system state.
System DesignTechnical ScreenDistributed SystemsData PipelinesScalability - AtlassianHardFrontend EngineerDesign a Fast Product Search Page: Search Input over an Unbounded Catalog Grid
A front-end system design question about a product search page with a search input above a grid of results drawn from a catalog of unbounded size. It probes the component tree, where search state should live, and how the candidate keeps typing responsive and results fast when the result set can never be loaded all at once.
System DesignTechnical Screen - AtlassianEasySoftware EngineerDesign a Rate Limiter Service: Components, Scaling and Precision Trade-offs
A three-part system design question about a rate limiter service: the components a simple limiter needs, how to scale it as users grow and what breaks, and how to make limits more precise. It tests shared counters, atomic updates, hot callers, failure policy and the accuracy trade-offs between rate limiting algorithms.
System DesignTechnical Screen - AtlassianMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a distributed rate limiter service
This question tests the ability to design a scalable, low-latency distributed rate-limiting service that handles high-concurrency requests across multiple microservices.
System DesignTechnical ScreenDistributed SystemsCachingScalability - AtlassianHardSoftware EngineerDesign a scalable tagging system
This question tests a candidate's ability to design scalable data models and distributed indexing strategies for a multi-tenant tagging system. It evaluates system design competency across storage, caching, sharding, and consistency trade-offs — core skills assessed in senior software engineering interviews.
System DesignTechnical Screen - AtlassianMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a simple greeting-card web app
This question assesses the ability to design a scalable, functional MVP for a greeting-card service, focusing on user-generated content storage and retrieval.
System DesignTechnical ScreenAPI DesignDatabase ModelingScalability - AtlassianMediumSoftware EngineerDiagnose why a scaled system became slow
Tests systematic incident triage, observability strategies, and root-cause analysis across distributed tiers (caching, connection pools, databases, compute) when a scaled service suffers severe latency degradation.
System DesignTechnical Screensystem-designobservabilityperformance-debugging - AtlassianHardSoftware EngineerEnsure thread-safe updates to org hierarchy
Ensure thread-safe updates to org hierarchy 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 DesignTechnical Screen - AtlassianMediumFrontend EngineerFront-End Design of an Emoji Picker with a Search Field
A candidate-driven front-end system design discussion about an emoji picker with a search field. It tests how a candidate scopes the component, models and loads the emoji catalog, ranks search results, keeps a grid of thousands of emoji fast, and supports keyboard and screen-reader users.
System DesignTechnical Screen - AttentiveMediumSoftware EngineerDesign Broadcast Scheduling APIs
This question evaluates a candidate’s ability to design scalable, reliable broadcast and scheduling systems, covering API design, data modeling, distributed scheduling, delivery semantics, idempotency, retries, and operational fault-tolerance.
System DesignTechnical Screen - AttentiveMediumSoftware EngineerDesign Robust Large-Input Processing
This question evaluates debugging and root-cause analysis, memory management, streaming/chunked data processing (including correctness across chunk boundaries), and system reliability aspects such as observability, testing, and recovery for large-input backends.
System DesignTechnical Screen
Anthropic
Apple
Applied Intuition
Asana
Atlassian
Attentive