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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 91–120 of 517 results
- AttentiveMediumSoftware EngineerDesign Storage for a Flexible Metrics Monitoring System
This problem tests the ability to design a time-series storage system by balancing read/write throughput, data retention policies, and query performance at scale.
System DesignTechnical ScreenTime-SeriesDatabaseData Modeling - AttentiveMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Data Puller for a Third-Party API Capped at 3 Requests per Second
Design a service that pulls and syncs data from a third-party API that enforces a hard limit of 3 requests per second. It tests global rate limiting across distributed workers, retry and backoff behavior, incremental sync with checkpoints, and prioritizing work when demand exceeds the request budget.
System DesignTechnical Screen - AxonMediumSoftware EngineerDesign Reliable Upload and Download for Very Large Files
Design resumable upload and range-based download for files too large to transfer reliably in one request. Cover chunk identity, integrity hashes, idempotent completion, authorization, committed-file visibility, object-storage layout, and cleanup of abandoned sessions.
System DesignTechnical Screen - AxonHardSoftware EngineerDesign a Nearest-Timestamp Status Record Service
Design a high-throughput time-series ingestion and query service that handles out-of-order, duplicate officer telemetry and returns the record closest in time to a requested query timestamp.
System DesignTechnical Screensystem-designtime-seriesdistributed-systems - AxonMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Test Orchestration System
This question evaluates system design and backend engineering competencies, including distributed orchestration, scheduling, scalability, reliability, operational monitoring, API design, and data modeling for a test orchestration service; it is categorized under System Design and related domains such as distributed systems and CI/CD platforms.
System DesignTechnical Screen - AxonHardSoftware EngineerDesign a tamper-evident video chain-of-custody audit system
Design a tamper-evident video chain-of-custody audit 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 DesignTechnical Screen - AxonHardSoftware EngineerDesign an airline booking system
This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design scalable, consistent, and resilient distributed systems for transactional domains, emphasizing API design, data modeling, concurrency control, idempotency, seat inventory guarantees, and external integrations like payments and ticketing.
System DesignTechnical Screen - AxonMediumSoftware EngineerDesign an image-to-multilanguage translator
This question tests the ability to design a distributed, scalable image processing pipeline that integrates OCR with translation services while addressing latency, storage, and reliability concerns.
System DesignTechnical ScreenDistributed SystemsScalabilityAsynchronous Processing - AxonMediumSoftware EngineerDesign analytical tracking database
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 analytical tracking database states assumptions, handles edge cases, explains trade-offs, and shows how to validate the result clearly.
System DesignTechnical Screen - AxonMediumSoftware EngineerDesign camera-footage upload with custody chain
This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design resilient, secure large-file ingestion systems with integrity verification, resumable chunked uploads, malware and file-type scanning, and an auditable tamper-evident chain of custody, commonly asked to assess architectural thinking about reliability, security, and compliance for evidentiary data. It is in the System Design domain (storage, APIs, background processing, and audit logging) and tests practical application of architectural trade-offs, failure-mode reasoning, and operational concerns rather than only theoretical concepts.
System DesignTechnical Screen - AxonMediumSoftware EngineerDesign fulfillment truck routing and inventory system
This question evaluates architectural design skills for scalable, event-driven fulfillment systems, including competencies in inventory/container state tracking, high-throughput event processing, transactional dock-door scheduling, and vehicle routing optimization; domain: system design.
System DesignTechnical Screen - BasetenMediumData EngineerDesign a Data Pipeline for Messy Pod Alerts and Bad Pod Detection
Prepare for a Baseten system design interview about design a data pipeline for messy pod alerts and bad pod detection. This question focuses on requirements, architecture, trade-offs, reliability, and follow-up discussion areas.
System DesignTechnical Screen - Basis AiMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Layover Activity Recommendation App
This question evaluates product sense, system-design reasoning, and the ability to design risk-aware, real-time recommendation services for mobile layover experiences, emphasizing ambiguity handling and preventing catastrophic failures like missed flights.
System DesignTechnical Screen - Bilt RewardsMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Configurable Reward Points Service
Design a highly available and auditable reward points service that ingests credit card and rent transactions, evaluates versioned earning rules, and maintains an append-only double-entry ledger.
System DesignTechnical ScreenLedgerIdempotencyFintech - BloombergMediumSoftware EngineerDesign A Real-Time VWAP Analytics Provider
Tests the ability to design an ultra-low-latency, stateful streaming pipeline that ingests heterogeneous market data feeds, maintains running volume-weighted aggregates, handles trade adjustments, and serves high-throughput subscriber fanout.
System DesignTechnical ScreenStream ProcessingLow LatencyFinancial Systems - BloombergMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a packet reassembler API
This question evaluates API design, stream-oriented buffer management, stateful packet assembly, input validation, concurrency control, testing strategy, and time/space complexity reasoning.
System DesignTechnical Screen - BloombergHardSoftware EngineerExplain Kafka partitions and delivery semantics
This question evaluates understanding of distributed messaging and stream-processing concepts—specifically Kafka internals such as partitions, replication, consumer groups, and delivery semantics—and the candidate's competency in reasoning about ordering, scalability, fault tolerance, and transactional guarantees.
System DesignTechnical Screen - BobyardMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a client-side comment system
This question evaluates front-end engineering competencies including client-side data modeling, state management, UI behavior for nested comment trees, sorting/filtering semantics, and persistence using localStorage.
System DesignTechnical Screen - BobyardMediumSoftware EngineerDesign comments and async image generation
This question evaluates full-stack system-design competencies, including CRUD API and data-model design for sortable queries with persisted user preferences, frontend-backend synchronization, and asynchronous long-running job orchestration, status/result APIs, and UI ordering for image generation; it falls under the System Design category and tests a mix of conceptual architectural reasoning and practical application design. It is commonly asked because it probes the ability to balance scalability, consistency, user experience, and fault-tolerant asynchronous processing when designing end-to-end systems that must handle persistence, ordering guarantees, and long-running background work.
System DesignTechnical Screen - Booking.comMediumSoftware EngineerCompare heap, stack, Protobuf, gRPC, SQL, CI/CD
Compare heap, stack, Protobuf, gRPC, SQL, CI/CD 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 - BrexMediumSoftware EngineerBuild AI-Assisted Full-Stack Transactions App
This question evaluates full‑stack engineering competencies including API design, data persistence, input validation, transactional integrity for monetary data, frontend-backend integration, automated testing, and developer documentation.
System DesignTechnical Screen - BrexHardSoftware EngineerDesign Points-from-Transactions Service
This question evaluates system design and distributed-systems competency, focusing on transaction processing, idempotency and deduplication, monetary precision and rounding, consistency models, data modeling, and operational controls like observability and fraud prevention.
System DesignTechnical Screen - BridgeMediumSoftware EngineerDesign signup and login service
This question evaluates understanding of authentication system design, secure password storage practices, API endpoint and request/response modeling, database schema design, and session or token-based login state management.
System DesignTechnical Screen - ByteDanceMediumSoftware EngineerDesign An Ad Creative Relationship Processing System
This question tests your ability to design a distributed asynchronous processing pipeline that manages entity relationships, handles API retries, and maintains state consistency across multiple dependent components.
System DesignTechnical ScreenDistributed SystemsAsync ProcessingDatabase Schema - ByteDanceMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Monitoring Dashboard with Explicit Latency Goals
Design a monitoring dashboard that separates data freshness from query latency, with ingestion, rollups, browser updates, and stale-data handling.
System DesignTechnical Screen - ByteDanceHardSoftware EngineerDesign a Synchronized Live Comment Overlay
Design a live comment overlay that stays synchronized with a video during live viewing, replay, seeking, and reconnects. Explore timeline semantics, stable ordering, scalable fanout, replay queries, moderation, backpressure, and graceful degradation during traffic bursts.
System DesignTechnical Screen - ByteDanceMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Ticket Booking System for High-Demand On-Sales Without Overselling
A system design question about a ticket booking system for high-demand on-sales. It probes how to absorb the traffic spike when sales open with load balancing, waiting rooms and rate limiting, and how to manage inventory with holds, payment-timeout release and consistent cache and database updates so that no ticket is ever sold twice.
System DesignTechnical Screen - ByteDanceHardSoftware EngineerDesign an E-Commerce Platform with Reliable Checkout
Design an e-commerce platform with searchable catalogs, carts, atomic inventory reservations, idempotent checkout, payment recovery, and reliable order state.
System DesignTechnical Screen - ByteDanceMediumSoftware EngineerDesign an RBAC Relational Schema
This problem tests your ability to design a normalized relational database schema that implements Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) to support hierarchical users, roles, and resource-level permissions.
System DesignTechnical ScreenSQLDatabase SchemaRBAC - ByteDanceMediumSoftware EngineerEvaluate a Migration from MySQL to MongoDB
Evaluate whether a MySQL-backed service should migrate to MongoDB using its actual workload and correctness needs. Compare relational and document models, joins and transactions, then outline a dual-run migration, rollback plan, and measurements that would prove an improvement.
System DesignTechnical Screen
Attentive
Axon
Baseten
Bloomberg
Booking.com
Brex