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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 1171–1200 of 1311 results
- SoFiHardSoftware EngineerScale a key-value store with consistent hashing
Scale a key-value store with consistent hashing 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 - SonatusHardSoftware EngineerDesign a RAG system for vehicle documents
This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design a Retrieval-Augmented Generation system, testing competencies in information retrieval, vector search, document ingestion and chunking, metadata modeling, citation handling, security, observability, and scalability within the system design and NLP/information-retrieval domain.
System DesignTechnical Screen - SotiMediumSoftware EngineerDesign an IP blacklist API
This question evaluates API and backend system design skills for network security and distributed caching, encompassing data modeling for exact IPs and CIDR ranges, cache architecture and invalidation, consistency and failure handling, scaling, and observability.
System DesignOnsite - SpeakHardSoftware EngineerDesign scenario-based speaking feature
This question evaluates system-design competency in building scalable, real-time, multilingual audio-driven learning features, including product modeling, session orchestration, audio pipelines (ASR/TTS), personalization, localization, telemetry, and privacy/security considerations.
System DesignOnsite - SpeakHardSoftware EngineerDesign speaking scenarios and auth/profile API
This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design scalable, real-time speaking-practice features and a minimal authentication/profile API, encompassing system architecture, service decomposition, data modeling, ASR/LLM integration, personalization, security and privacy, and operational concerns like scaling and observability.
System DesignOnsite - SpotifyMediumBackend EngineerDesign a Public Upload and Hosting Service for Playlist Cover Images
A Spotify system design question: design a service that lets users upload, replace and remove a public cover image for their playlists, served to the app and to third-party embeds. Follow-ups cover how an auditor would review image changes and how upload and processing failures are handled.
System DesignOnsite - Sprinter HealthMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Game Store with Purchases, Downloads, and Reviews
Design connected game-store pages for category browsing, purchases, authorized downloads, and reviews with consistent data and retry behavior.
System DesignTechnical Screen - Sprinter HealthMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a scalable game app store
This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design a scalable backend system, covering competencies in system architecture, data modeling, distributed services, media asset delivery, secure transactional flows, and operational trade-offs around scalability, availability, and consistency.
System DesignOnsite - StripeMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Count-Metrics Monitoring Platform
Design a scalable count-metrics monitoring and alerting platform capable of tracking real-time event counts and rates, grouping by dimensional labels, handling duplicate/late events, and enforcing cardinality limits.
System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsObservabilityStream Processing - StripeHardSoftware EngineerDesign a Distributed Metrics Counter
This question tests the ability to architect a highly available, scalable system for ingesting and aggregating high-throughput telemetry data while managing trade-offs between consistency and performance.
System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsMetricsScalability - StripeHardSoftware EngineerDesign a Feature Flag Service with Percentage Rollouts and Allow/Block Lists
System design question: design a feature flag service, similar in spirit to Amazon's Weblab, that lets teams turn features on or off, roll them out to a percentage of users, and force them on or off with allow and block lists. It probes where flag checks run, how users are assigned consistently, and how changes reach every service safely.
System DesignTechnical Screen - StripeMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Merchant Ledger Service
This question tests your ability to design a distributed ledger system that ensures high transactional integrity, strict consistency for financial balances, and reliable idempotency in a high-concurrency environment.
System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsDatabase DesignConsistency - StripeMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Scalable Idempotent Ledger Service
Design a high-throughput, fault-tolerant double-entry ledger service featuring immutable postings, strict write idempotency, and tunable balance freshness.
System DesignTechnical ScreenDistributed SystemsDatabase DesignFinancial Systems - StripeMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Superhero Dispatch System
This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design reliable, distributed backend systems with emphasis on transactional correctness, concurrency control for single-winner acceptance races, geo-spatial querying for proximity matching, eventing/notification pipelines, and operational observability for mission-critical dispatch.
System DesignOnsite - StripeHardSoftware EngineerDesign a local activity counter service
This question evaluates a candidate's skills in designing large-scale distributed systems, focusing on near-real-time ingestion and aggregation, idempotency/deduplication, time-windowed (tumbling and sliding) analytics, hot-key sharding, storage and backfill strategies, and operational concerns including monitoring and privacy.
System DesignTechnical Screen - StripeMediumSoftware EngineerDesign an Idempotent Double-Entry Ledger
Design a highly reliable, idempotent double-entry ledger system that guarantees strict consistency, append-only immutability, and supports high-concurrency writes on hot accounts.
System DesignTechnical Screensystem-designfintechdistributed-systems - StripeHardSoftware EngineerDesign ledger and bikemap integration
This question evaluates competency in designing strongly consistent financial ledgers and integrating an external routing service, testing data modeling, distributed transactions, linearizability and idempotency, scalability, security, API design, and observability in the System Design domain.
System DesignOnsite - StubHubMediumSoftware EngineerDesign Event Email System
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 Event Email System states assumptions, handles edge cases, explains trade-offs, and shows how to validate the result clearly.
System DesignOnsite - StubHubMediumSoftware EngineerDesign Internal Chat and Re-engagement Emails
This question evaluates a candidate's competency in designing scalable, real-time messaging systems and re-engagement workflows, covering distributed systems concepts such as WebSocket-based bidirectional communication, presence, cross-server message routing, message persistence, APIs, storage trade-offs, inactivity detection, and email-triggering workflows. Commonly asked in the System Design category, it tests high-level architectural reasoning and practical application of scalability, reliability, and failure-handling trade-offs when integrating persistent WebSocket connections, cross-server routing, and background email jobs in a distributed platform.
System DesignOnsite - StubHubMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Global Marketing Email Platform
This problem tests your ability to design a high-throughput, fault-tolerant email delivery system that handles scheduling across time zones, manages email templates, and provides basic analytics.
System DesignOnsiteScalabilityDistributed SystemsMessaging - StubHubHardSoftware EngineerReview getEvents endpoint for readability, performance, scalability, security
A StubHub software-engineer technical-screen system-design exercise: review and fix a GET /events HTTP handler that loads related data (venue, performers, tickets, transactions) per event. Candidates must find and fix the N+1 query, then harden the endpoint across readability/architecture, performance (pagination, indexing, caching), scalability (timeouts, retries, rate limiting), and security (authN/authZ, injection, PII), with trade-offs, SLOs, and a test plan.
System DesignTechnical Screen - TemporalMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a One-to-One Chat System
This problem tests your ability to design a distributed, low-latency, real-time messaging system, focusing on message delivery guarantees, state management, and scalability.
System DesignTechnical ScreenWebSocketsDistributed SystemsScalability - TeslaMediumSoftware EngineerBalance Backend Availability, Maintainability, and Scalability
Design a high-throughput vehicle telemetry and diagnostics backend while evaluating explicit architectural trade-offs among availability, maintainability, and scalability.
System DesignHR ScreenDistributed SystemsIoTKafka - TeslaMediumSoftware EngineerDescribe how you use Kubernetes
Describe how you use Kubernetes 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 - TeslaHardSoftware EngineerDesign a Distributed Blob Storage System for Build Artifacts
Design a distributed storage system for build artifacts, similar to a distributed NoSQL database but storing opaque blobs with looser ACID requirements. It tests separating immutable data from consistent metadata, upload atomicity, replication and repair, handling download fan-out, and safe retention and garbage collection.
System DesignOnsite - TeslaHardSoftware EngineerDesign a Supercharger Backend: Billing, Stall Telemetry and Nearest Available Charger
System design question on the backend for an electric-vehicle fast-charging network: billing each session by the energy delivered, storing stall health telemetry long term, and showing drivers the nearest available charger with its price. Probes secure device communication, DNS and routing, local buffering and sync versus async choices.
System DesignTechnical Screen - TeslaMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Video Sharing Platform
Design a resilient, large-scale video sharing and streaming platform that handles multi-gigabyte uploads, asynchronous transcoding, and low-latency global delivery. This question tests your ability to design chunked upload protocols, idempotent processing pipelines, and CDN-backed adaptive streaming architectures.
System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsVideo StreamingCDN - TeslaMediumSoftware EngineerDesign an Order Fulfillment System
Design an order-fulfillment system and explain its major components, data flow, and reliability trade-offs.
System DesignOnsite - TeslaMediumBackend EngineerDesign booking and settlement systems
This question evaluates backend system design competencies such as concurrency control, transactional integrity, reconciliation, file ingestion and processing, idempotency, API design, and operational reliability.
System DesignOnsite - TeslaHardSoftware EngineerDesign concurrency-safe shared payment account API
Design concurrency-safe shared payment account API 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
SoFi
Spotify
Stripe
StubHub
Tesla