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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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- 546
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- 11
- Topics
- 8
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Showing 1111–1140 of 1311 results
- SalesforceMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Scalable Notification Service
Design an enterprise-grade, multi-channel notification platform capable of handling billions of notifications with durable ingestion, dynamic user preference filtering, idempotency, rate limits, and pluggable delivery providers.
System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsMessage QueuesRate Limiting - SalesforceMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Synchronized Watch Party System (LLD)
Design a low-level object-oriented system for real-time synchronized video playback among multiple participants. The challenge tests class design, state synchronization protocols, and handling of network latency and clock drift.
System DesignOnsiteLow-Level DesignObject-Oriented DesignReal-Time Systems - SalesforceMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a URL-Shortening Service
Design short-link creation and redirects with unique identifiers, durable mappings, caching, expiration, and explicit multi-region consistency choices.
System DesignOnsite - SalesforceMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Venue Rental and Booking System (HLD)
Design a high-level architecture for a venue rental marketplace, focusing on inventory availability modeling, concurrency control to prevent double-booking, and resilient schema and API design under read-heavy traffic.
System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsDatabase DesignConcurrency - SalesforceMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a coffee ordering system
This question evaluates system design competency, focusing on order lifecycle modeling and state-machine enforcement, idempotency and data consistency, event-driven integration, real-time status propagation, and scaling across stores.
System DesignTechnical Screen - SalesforceMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a pipeline orchestration system on Kubernetes
This question tests the ability to design a container-orchestrated workflow system that manages dependencies, task execution, and system reliability.
System DesignOnsiteKubernetesDistributed SystemsWorkflow Orchestration - SalesforceMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a scalable coffee ordering notification system
This problem tests your ability to design a distributed, asynchronous notification system capable of handling high-throughput order status updates and ensuring reliable message delivery to end users.
System DesignOnsiteScalabilityAsynchronousMessaging - SalesforceMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a tenant-isolated system to replicate large recordings to per-customer data centers
System design question: build a tenant-isolated pipeline that copies large files such as call recordings from a source data center to each customer's chosen data centers. It tests staged design from a simple copy to asynchronous fan-out, resumable transfers, retries, verification, reconciliation and per-tenant isolation.
System DesignOther - SalesforceMediumMember of Technical StaffDesign an Idempotent Payment Processing Platform
Design a resilient payment platform that guarantees zero duplicate charges and safely resolves ambiguous downstream gateway timeouts.
System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsPaymentsIdempotency - SalesforceMediumSoftware EngineerDesign an analytics dashboard for an AI chat app
This question tests the ability to architect a scalable observability pipeline for high-throughput AI chat interactions, focusing on metrics ingestion, data aggregation, and multi-dimensional query performance.
System DesignOnsiteAnalyticsScalabilityOLAP - SalesforceHardSoftware EngineerDesign an async job system and cache layer
This question tests the ability to architect a distributed job processing system and integrate a high-performance caching layer to handle scheduling, execution, and state management at scale.
System DesignTechnical ScreenDistributed SystemsCachingAsync Processing - SalesforceHardSoftware EngineerDesign cloud & k8s architecture
This interview question evaluates requirements, scale assumptions, API/data design, architecture, trade-offs, failure modes, and rollout in a realistic interview setting. A strong answer for Design cloud & k8s architecture states assumptions, handles edge cases, explains trade-offs, and shows how to validate the result clearly.
System DesignTechnical Screen - SalesforceHardSoftware EngineerDesign secure Kubernetes with CI/CD
This question evaluates expertise in Kubernetes architecture, cluster operations and troubleshooting, security hardening, and CI/CD pipeline design for managed Kubernetes clusters, covering control plane and node responsibilities, incident diagnosis, access and network policies, secret management, image integrity, and progressive delivery mechanisms. It is commonly asked to assess operational and security judgment and design thinking, testing both conceptual understanding of distributed control and security models and practical application in real-world CI/CD and incident-response scenarios within the System Design domain.
System DesignTechnical Screen - SalesforceMediumMember of Technical StaffTrack Top-K Frequent Elements from an Unbounded Stream
Tests the ability to architect a distributed streaming system for continuous top-k frequent element tracking over unbounded data streams, evaluating trade-offs between exact counts and probabilistic heavy-hitter algorithms under scale, state management, and fault-tolerance constraints.
System DesignOnsitesystem-designstreamingtop-k - SalesforceMediumSoftware EngineerWalk Through the Architecture of the Project You Work on Now
A design-round prompt asking you to walk through the architecture of the project you currently work on: its purpose, components, request and data flows, technology choices, scale and failure handling, and your own part in it. It assesses clarity, ownership and depth under probing.
System DesignOnsite - Scale AIEasyBackend EngineerDesign a Durable Task Scheduling Service
Design a resilient, distributed task scheduling service that decouples scheduling from execution, supporting both delayed one-time tasks and recurring cron jobs with strong durability and at-least-once delivery.
System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsTask SchedulerConcurrency - Scale AIEasySoftware EngineerDesign a Streaming Job Scheduler
This question evaluates task scheduling, deadline-based prioritization, dependency management, and distributed coordination competencies, encompassing algorithmic/data-structure reasoning as well as correctness under concurrency and failure conditions.
System DesignTechnical Screen - Scale AIMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a large-scale ticketing system
This question evaluates skills in large-scale system design, including distributed systems, concurrency control, transactional correctness, data modeling, API design, and integration with external payment providers.
System DesignTechnical Screen - ScribdMediumSoftware EngineerProduct Event Tracking and Analytics Pipeline With Flexible Schema and Retention
This question tests the architectural design of a scalable event-tracking pipeline capable of handling heterogeneous JSON schemas, choosing appropriate storage tiers for analytical queries, and managing data lifecycle policies.
System DesignOnsiteData PipelineSchema DesignStorage - Sentry.IoMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Book Purchase Broker
This problem tests the ability to design a resilient distributed system that orchestrates third-party API calls, handles partial failures, and ensures transactional integrity across asynchronous boundaries.
System DesignTechnical ScreenDistributed SystemsAPIsAsync Processing - ShopifyMediumData EngineerChoose Between Batch and Streaming for a Data Pipeline
Work through a data-platform design that must support fast operational metrics and reproducible daily reporting. Compare batch, streaming, and hybrid choices while addressing late events, deduplication, replay, backfills, governance, and recovery.
System DesignTechnical Screen - ShopifyMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Product Photography Upload Service
Design a product-photography workflow from shoot creation and direct upload through processing, merchant review, acceptance, and reshoots. Cover scoped upload authorization, authoritative metadata, idempotent state transitions, stale completion events, notifications, retention, and publication safety.
System DesignOnsite - ShopifyHardSoftware EngineerDesign a rare-book lending and returns system
Design a rare-book lending and returns 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 - ShopifyMediumSoftware EngineerScaling a Collision-Free Rover Fleet to a Million Robots
This question tests the ability to design a distributed system that manages real-time state consistency across a massive, sharded spatial grid while handling concurrency and robot movement.
System DesignTechnical ScreenDistributed SystemsConcurrencySharding - ShopifyMediumSoftware EngineerTechnical Deep Dive: Present a System You Built as a Design Retrospective
A senior engineering interview round in which you present a system you designed or led, using a diagram prepared in advance, and then defend it under questioning. It tests how you frame the problem and your ownership, explain key decisions and their alternatives, discuss failures honestly, and go deep on any component.
System DesignOnsite - SierraMediumSoftware EngineerDesign an LLM-Powered Customer Service Chat System with Robust Failure Handling
A system design interview for a customer-service chat system whose replies come from an external LLM provider. It walks through the end-to-end happy path and publish/subscribe message delivery, then focuses on error handling when the provider partially fails or the network drops, on both the server and the client.
System DesignOnsite - SnapchatMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Column-Queryable KV Database
This problem tests your ability to design a distributed key-value storage system that supports efficient column-based filtering and range scans, balancing write performance against analytical query capabilities.
System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsNoSQLStorage - SnapchatMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Metrics System
Design a high-throughput, low-latency metrics collection, aggregation, and querying platform. The question tests your ability to handle multi-dimensional time-series data, mitigate high-cardinality label explosions, and design tiered storage for varying query windows.
System DesignOnsiteTime SeriesDistributed SystemsScalability - SnapchatHardSoftware EngineerDesign a News Aggregator
This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design scalable content ingestion and distribution systems, encompassing API-driven fetching, scheduling, deduplication, storage, ranking, freshness guarantees, API rate limiting, and efficient article serving.
System DesignOnsite - SnapchatMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Pre-Login Risk and Challenge Service
Design a low-latency, resilient pre-login security service that evaluates risk signals, issues dynamic verification challenges, and verifies responses without exposing authentication flows to replay attacks.
System DesignOnsiteSecurityDistributed SystemsAuthentication
Salesforce
Scale AI
Shopify
Sierra
Snapchat