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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 961–990 of 1311 results
- Otter.AiMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Google Docs-Style Real-Time Collaborative Editing Backend
Design the backend of a Google Docs-style editor in which many users edit the same document in real time and every copy converges to the same text. Tests concurrency control for simultaneous edits, routing of document sessions, operation storage and revision history, presence, and recovery from disconnects and server failures.
System DesignOnsite - Otter.AiEasySoftware EngineerExtend a Key-Value Store with Commits and Explicit Rollover Semantics
Design a versioned key-value store supporting staging, atomic commits, point-in-time snapshot reads, and automated rollover compaction.
System DesignTechnical ScreenKey-Value StoreMVCCConcurrency - PalantirMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Real-Time Collision Warning System for Drones in Shared Airspace
Design a system that ingests live telemetry from many drones sharing airspace and warns operators when two of them are predicted to come too close. It tests streaming ingestion, spatial partitioning, trajectory-based conflict prediction, alert delivery and reliability under the latency and safety demands of a real-time system.
System DesignOther - PalantirEasySoftware EngineerDesign a Server Metrics Monitor
This question evaluates knowledge of distributed system design, scheduling and orchestration, concurrency, fault tolerance, and observability in the context of large-scale metric collection.
System DesignOnsite - PalantirMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Tool Registration, Discovery and Safe Execution Layer for LLM Agents
A senior system design question about the platform that lets LLM-driven agents discover and call backend tools. It probes tool registration and discovery, schema definition versus runtime validation of model-generated arguments, the interface between backend services and agents, and patterns for executing actions safely.
System DesignOther - PalantirMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a compliant multi-tenant analytics platform
This question tests the ability to design a secure, scalable multi-tenant analytics platform that enforces strict data isolation and fine-grained access control while maintaining rigorous audit trails.
System DesignOnsiteMulti-tenancySecurityABAC - PalantirHardSoftware EngineerDesign a scalable interview question bank
Design a scalable interview question bank 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 - Palo Alto NetworksMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Scheduler and Metrics Platform
This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design cloud-native distributed systems, covering job scheduling, lifecycle management, observability, persistence, resource-aware placement, retry semantics, and multi-tenant security for containerized workloads.
System DesignOnsite - Palo Alto NetworksEasySoftware EngineerDesign a device configuration system
This question evaluates system design and distributed systems competency, including API design, storage modeling, rollout workflows, operational behavior, and consistency trade-offs for device configuration management.
System DesignOnsite - Palo Alto NetworksMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a thread-safe high-QPS rate limiter
A Palo Alto Networks system-design screen: design and implement a thread-safe, high-QPS rate limiter that enforces per-identity request quotas. The answer covers algorithm choice (token bucket vs. fixed/sliding window), atomic per-key state with locks or CAS, hot-path performance, bounded-memory eviction, distributed scaling (Redis+Lua, token leasing, consistent-hash partitioning), and rejection semantics.
System DesignTechnical Screen - ParafinHardSoftware EngineerDesign a loan application system
Design a loan application system 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 - ParafinHardSoftware EngineerDesign loan application system
This question evaluates architecture and systems engineering competencies related to building scalable, compliant financial platforms, including data modeling, API and event-driven workflow design, security, and regulatory integration.
System DesignOnsite - Paramount CommerceHardSoftware EngineerDesign a Go music player with playlists
This question evaluates object-oriented system design, API and data-structure modeling, state and concurrency management, persistence considerations, and algorithmic time/space complexity within a Go-based music player domain.
System DesignTechnical Screen - PatreonEasyData EngineerDesign a Data Processing System for JSON User Records: Batch vs Streaming Input
Design a data processing system for JSON user records that contain names, addresses and payment methods, and explain how the design changes when the upstream source delivers data in batches versus as a continuous stream. It tests pipeline architecture, idempotent loading, ordering and late data, and the handling of sensitive fields.
System DesignTechnical Screen - PayPalMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Cross-Border Money Transfer Service
This question evaluates proficiency in designing distributed, fault-tolerant payment systems with competencies in payments flows, exchange-rate management, compliance and regulatory constraints, transactional integrity, idempotency, scalability, reliability, and observability.
System DesignOnsite - PayPalMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Payment Fraud Detection Service
This system design question tests the ability to architect a real-time, low-latency fraud decisioning service that combines deterministic rule engines with machine learning model scores. It evaluates practical understanding of distributed systems trade-offs, feature store design, and safe model/rule deployment on a high-availability critical path.
System DesignOnsite - PayPalMediumData ScientistDesign elevator scheduling for small building
Design elevator scheduling for small building 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 - PerplexityHardSoftware EngineerDesign a personal finance aggregator
This question evaluates skills in large-scale system design including API and third-party integrations, data ingestion and normalization, transactional consistency and idempotency, security and privacy controls, data modeling for multi-currency financial records, and operational concerns like alerts and budgeting.
System DesignTechnical Screen - PerplexityHardSoftware EngineerDiagnose overloaded Kubernetes cluster
This question evaluates competency in diagnosing and mitigating production overloads in Kubernetes-based microservice architectures, emphasizing observability, autoscaling behavior, resource constraints, and incident-response reasoning.
System DesignTechnical Screen - PinterestHardSoftware EngineerDesign Bulk CSV and Individual Record Updates with Reliable, Partitioned Processing
A system design question about letting customers update records individually and in bulk by uploading CSV files. It focuses on reliable asynchronous job processing, idempotent row application, partitioning large files and the underlying data, conflicts between the two write paths, and reporting row outcomes.
System DesignOnsite - PinterestHardSoftware EngineerDesign Comment Notifications with Viral-Pin Aggregation
Tests end-to-end system design for large-scale, bursty notification pipelines, focusing on stream processing, aggregation under viral traffic spikes, and reliable third-party push delivery.
System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsStream ProcessingMessage Queues - PinterestHardSoftware EngineerDesign Individual and Bulk Merchant Product Updates with Image Uploads
This problem tests the ability to design a distributed system capable of handling high-throughput asynchronous updates, atomic transactional integrity for partial batch failures, and robust image processing pipelines.
System DesignOnsiteAsynchronous ProcessingConcurrencyScalability - PinterestHardSoftware EngineerDesign Real-Time Search Autocomplete with Top-10 Popularity-Ranked Prefix Suggestions
Design a distributed search autocomplete system capable of returning the top 10 popularity-ranked queries for any prefix with sub-30ms latency. The problem evaluates your ability to handle massive read throughput, partition heavily skewed prefix workloads, and merge streaming popularity signals with batch historical baselines.
System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsSearchCaching - PinterestMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Distributed Rate Limiter
This problem evaluates your ability to design a distributed rate-limiting service that maintains low latency while enforcing consistent request quotas across multiple global nodes.
System DesignTechnical ScreenDistributed SystemsCachingConcurrency - PinterestMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Distributed Rate-Limiting Service
Design a highly available, ultra-low-latency distributed rate-limiting service supporting multi-tier rules (user, tenant, route, global) across globally distributed edge gateways.
System DesignOnline Assessmentsystem-designdistributed-systemsrate-limiting - PinterestHardSoftware EngineerDesign a Google Photos–like service
This question evaluates proficiency in designing large-scale distributed media systems, testing competencies in distributed storage and caching, ingest pipelines, CDN-backed delivery, indexing/search, sync/conflict resolution, access control/privacy compliance, and cost/operational planning.
System DesignOnsite - PinterestMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Large-File Upload and Analysis Flow
Tests the ability to design an end-to-end media ingestion system supporting chunked resumable uploads, asynchronous analysis pipelines, idempotency, and real-time client notifications.
System DesignOnsitesystem-designcloud-storagedistributed-systems - PinterestMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Low-Latency Typeahead Service
This problem tests the ability to design a high-throughput, low-latency search suggestion system that handles real-time updates and ranking at scale.
System DesignOnsiteCachingDistributed SystemsSearch - PinterestHardSoftware EngineerDesign a Merchant Catalog Update Pipeline with Bulk Files and Image Resizing
Tests the ability to architect a scalable, asynchronous catalog ingestion pipeline that balances high-throughput bulk feed processing with low-latency single-item edits while prioritizing price and inventory updates over compute-heavy image processing.
System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsData PipelinesMessage Queues - PinterestMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Multi-Channel Notification System
Design an extensible, resilient multi-channel notification engine (push, email, SMS, in-app) supporting high throughput, deduplication, quiet hours, rate limiting, and provider fallbacks.
System DesignOnline Assessmentsystem-designdistributed-systemsevent-driven
Otter.Ai
Palantir
Palo Alto Networks
PayPal
Perplexity
Pinterest