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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 151–180 of 721 results
- Cockroach LabsMediumSoftware EngineerPresent and Defend an End-to-End Project You Owned: Architecture, Choices, Challenges
A choose-your-own system design round: present a core project you owned end to end at a previous job, then defend its architecture, technology choices and hardest challenges under detailed probing. Tests depth of ownership, trade-off reasoning and the ability to move from a diagram to concrete mechanisms.
System DesignOnsite - CohereMediumFrontend EngineerDesign a Real-Time Comment System Front End With Optimistic Updates
Front-end system design for a real-time comment feed, centered on optimistic updates: a new comment is appended to the list before the backend confirms it, so the user can keep typing. It tests client state modeling, reconciliation with live echoes, failure and retry handling, ordering, reconnection and rendering performance.
System DesignOnsite - CoinbaseHardSoftware EngineerDesign Crypto Order Routing
This question evaluates a candidate's ability to architect distributed, low-latency, and fault-tolerant order-placement and routing systems for cryptocurrency trading, covering consistency guarantees, external integration with heterogeneous venue protocols, fund reservation, execution reconciliation, and auditability.
System DesignOnsite - CoinbaseHardFrontend EngineerDesign Frontend Architecture for Trading UI
This question evaluates competency in frontend architecture for real-time trading UIs, covering state management, rendering strategies, real-time data flow, performance, reliability, security, testing, and observability.
System DesignOnsite - CoinbaseHardSoftware EngineerDesign a Cryptocurrency Trading System with Third-Party Exchanges
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 a Cryptocurrency Trading System with Third-Party Exchanges states assumptions, handles edge cases, explains trade-offs, and shows how to validate the result clearly.
System DesignOnsite - CoinbaseMediumBackend EngineerDesign a Real-Time Asset Price Service
Design a high-throughput, low-latency price ingestion and distribution service that normalizes multi-exchange market data, reconciles conflicting ticks, and delivers live prices to internal services and retail clients.
System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsWebSocketsReal-Time Data - CoinbaseHardSoftware EngineerDesign a basic banking system
This question evaluates understanding of transactional system design, data modeling for financial domains, API design, idempotency, concurrency control, immutable audit trails, and security considerations in an online banking context.
System DesignOnsite - CoinbaseHardSoftware EngineerDesign a crypto trading web frontend
This question evaluates frontend system architecture skills for real-time trading applications, covering framework and tooling choices, state and data layers, WebSocket-driven real-time updates, responsive and accessible UI design, performance optimization, testing, and security; it is in the System Design (frontend) domain.
System DesignOnsite - CoinbaseMediumSoftware EngineerDesign query pagination for large datasets
This question tests the ability to design a scalable, consistent pagination system for high-throughput transactional data, focusing on the trade-offs between offset-based and cursor-based approaches.
System DesignOnsitePaginationDatabase IndexingAPI Design - CoinbaseHardSoftware EngineerDesign real-time crypto prices homepage
This question tests your ability to design a high-throughput, low-latency streaming architecture capable of processing volatile financial data and pushing updates to millions of concurrent users.
System DesignOnsiteReal-timeScalabilityWebSockets - CoinbaseHardSoftware EngineerDesign real-time stock price viewer
This question evaluates system-design competency in building low-latency, high-throughput real-time streaming systems, covering ingestion, normalization, deduplication, aggregation, pub/sub dissemination, and operational resilience.
System DesignOnsite - ConfluentMediumSoftware EngineerDesign RSS Feed and Temporary Mail
This question tests the ability to design a dual-purpose system that handles high-throughput asynchronous feed ingestion and transient, short-lived email alias management.
System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsCachingMessage Queues - ConfluentMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a News Feed and Mail Service
This question evaluates a candidate's proficiency in large-scale system design, including distributed ingestion and deduplication, content ranking, API design choices (REST versus RPC), pagination and caching strategies, and techniques for generating and ensuring uniqueness of human-looking disposable email addresses.
System DesignOnsite - ConfluentMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Podcast Publishing System That Delivers New Episodes to Followers
A system design question about a podcast platform where creators publish episodes and followers see them in a feed. It covers the upload and processing path for audio, building each listener's feed of new episodes, and serving shows whose audiences range from a handful of listeners to millions.
System DesignOnsite - ConfluentMediumSoftware EngineerDesign an RSS News Feed Service
This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design a scalable RSS news feed service, emphasizing system architecture, relational schema and API design, including database table and index planning, ingestion and serving paths, deduplication/idempotency, and feed generation trade-offs.
System DesignOnsite - CoreweaveMediumSite Reliability EngineerDesign Batch Reboots for Machines
This question tests the ability to design a distributed system that orchestrates machine reboots while maintaining cluster capacity, service availability, and operational safety.
System DesignOnsiteOrchestrationDistributed SystemsReliability - CoreweaveMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Human Workflow Distribution System
Design a distributed workflow allocation platform that routes tasks to human operators, tracks execution state via leases, and ensures fair queueing and fault tolerance.
System DesignOnsitesystem-designdistributed-systemsqueueing - CoreweaveMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Notification System for Bursty Writes of 1M per Second
System design question for a notification system that must absorb bursty traffic of about one million writes per second. It covers requirements and capacity estimates, a queue-buffered write path, why a log-structured store such as Cassandra writes quickly, channel delivery and deduplication.
System DesignOnsite - CoreweaveMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Strongly Consistent, Fault-Tolerant Database for Fleet Validation Data
System design question about the database between an OS validation service that writes results and a fleet management service that reads them, with strong consistency required. It probes primary and replica failures, synchronous versus asynchronous replication, failover, two-phase commit and consensus.
System DesignOnsite - CoreweaveMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Website Monitoring Service
Design a globally distributed synthetic website monitoring service that executes periodic health probes, mitigates false-positive alerts, and ingests high-volume time-series metrics.
System DesignOnsitesystem-designdistributed-systemsmonitoring - CoupangMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a PKI for internal mTLS and certificates
This question evaluates a candidate's competency in PKI architecture, cryptographic key management, certificate lifecycle (issuance, renewal, revocation), and operational security for internal mTLS and related signing use cases.
System DesignOnsite - CoupangMediumSoftware EngineerDesign an IAM system for services and users
This question evaluates understanding of Identity and Access Management concepts including authentication and authorization flows, role- and policy-based permissions, temporary credential handling, multi-tenant access control, auditing, and scalability considerations.
System DesignOnsite - CoupangMediumSoftware EngineerDesign large video upload for a YouTube-like app
This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design scalable, reliable large-file upload subsystems, testing competencies in distributed storage, resumable transfers, data integrity, processing pipelines, security, and observability.
System DesignOnsite - CrowdstrikeMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a file upload and scanning report system
This problem tests your ability to design a distributed, asynchronous system that handles high-throughput file uploads, coordinates multi-engine security scanning, and provides reporting capabilities.
System DesignOnsiteScalabilityAsynchronousSecurity - CrusoeEasySoftware EngineerDesign a Slack-Like Messaging Platform
Design a real-time team messaging platform supporting channels, direct messages, message persistence, and presence tracking. The design tests your ability to model conversations, ensure reliable and ordered message delivery, and handle high-throughput fan-out.
System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsWebSocketsPub/Sub - DatabricksHardSoftware EngineerDesign Chat APIs, Storage, and Core Message Flows
Design a highly available and consistent backend chat system focusing on APIs, storage schema, idempotent message publishing, per-conversation sequencing, and versioned group membership.
System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsStorageAPIs - DatabricksMediumSoftware EngineerDesign Chat APIs, Storage, and Message Flows
Design chat APIs and database tables with durable message sends, idempotent retries, ordered history, live delivery, and reconnect recovery.
System DesignOnsite - DatabricksMediumSoftware EngineerDesign Messaging With Message Deletion
Design real-time messaging with conversations, history, and deletion that converges across storage layers and online or offline clients. Clarify authorization and retention, then address duplicate events, edit/reaction races, search and attachment cleanup, reconnect behavior, regional failover, audits, and strict erasure.
System DesignOnsite - DatabricksHardSoftware EngineerDesign a Bookstore Pricing API with Batch Fetches
Tests system design skills for building a high-throughput, contextual pricing service that balances HTTP protocol semantics, batch orchestration, personalized caching, and downstream protection.
System DesignOnsiteAPI DesignCachingMicroservices - DatabricksMediumFrontend EngineerDesign a Collaborative Playlist Editor
Tests your ability to architect a real-time collaborative frontend application, focusing on client-side state synchronization, deterministic list ordering, idempotent mutation protocols, and graceful network reconnection.
System DesignOnsiteFrontendReal-TimeData Modeling
Cohere
Coinbase
Confluent
Coreweave
Coupang
Crowdstrike
Databricks