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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
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Showing 181–210 of 517 results
- DuolingoHardSoftware EngineerDesign Animal Chess game classes
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 Animal Chess game classes states assumptions, handles edge cases, explains trade-offs, and shows how to validate the result clearly.
System DesignTechnical Screen - EngelhartMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Daily Weather-Forecast Pipeline That Runs Power Models for Energy Traders
Design a pipeline that ingests a weather forecast CSV published daily at a variable time, validates and stores it, runs black-box demand, wind, solar, hydro and price models across every scenario, and serves aggregated forecasts to traders. It tests scheduling, DAG design, failure handling, dashboard delivery and scaling to thousands of scenarios.
System DesignTechnical Screen - ExpediaHardSoftware EngineerDesign a listing connectivity ingestion service
This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design scalable, reliable REST APIs and distributed ingestion pipelines, testing competencies in API specification, idempotency, authentication/authorization, asynchronous processing, observability, and integration with downstream validation services.
System DesignTechnical Screen - FigmaMediumSoftware EngineerDesign Comments for a Collaborative Whiteboard
Design a real-time, durable commenting system for an infinite collaborative whiteboard where comments attach to dynamic canvas objects or fixed coordinates.
System DesignTechnical ScreenReal-Time SystemsWebSocketsData Modeling - FigmaMediumSoftware EngineerDesign Real-Time Collaborative Comments
Prepare for a real-time collaborative comments system design prompt for shared documents or canvases. The question covers durable comment writes, WebSocket fanout, reconnect backfill, ordering, permissions, hot-document scaling, and missed-update recovery.
System DesignTechnical Screen - FigmaMediumSoftware EngineerDesign Trending Collaborative Files
This problem tests the ability to design a distributed streaming architecture that aggregates real-time user activity while maintaining strict privacy and performance requirements.
System DesignTechnical ScreenStream ProcessingScalabilityDistributed Systems - FigureaiMediumData EngineerBuild a Firmware Data Quality and Release-Feedback Framework
This question tests the ability to design an end-to-end data pipeline architecture that ensures high-fidelity telemetry collection, automated quality validation, and safe release orchestration for embedded firmware devices.
System DesignTechnical ScreenData EngineeringFirmwareObservability - FigureaiMediumData EngineerDesign a Telemetry Platform Ingesting Two Gigabytes per Second
This question tests your ability to design a high-throughput, fault-tolerant telemetry ingestion pipeline capable of handling high-velocity data streams from distributed robotic systems.
System DesignTechnical ScreenData EngineeringScalabilityDistributed Systems - FivetranEasySoftware EngineerDesign a Simplified WhatsApp: Message Send and Receive, Schema, and Scaling
Design a simplified WhatsApp focused on sending and receiving messages: the online and offline delivery flow, client APIs, the database schema, and scaling. It tests connection routing, delivery guarantees and ordering, and a choice between relational and NoSQL storage justified by access patterns.
System DesignTechnical Screen - FlipsterEasySoftware EngineerDesign 64-bit distributed IDs and a parking lot
The question evaluates distributed-systems and scalability competencies for globally unique 64-bit ID generation (including sharding, time-ordering, fault tolerance and clock issues) as well as object-oriented design, concurrency control, API design, and data modeling for a parking lot backend.
System DesignTechnical Screen - FluidstackMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Distributed Job Scheduler for One-Off and Recurring Jobs
A system design question asking you to design a distributed job scheduler that runs jobs immediately, at a set time or on a recurring cron schedule across a pool of workers. It tests how you find due jobs at scale, prevent duplicate runs, recover from worker failures, and handle retries, bursts and missed runs.
System DesignTechnical Screen - Fora TravelMediumSoftware EngineerDesign Radius-Based Notifications from Mobile Locations
Tests the ability to design an end-to-end location ingestion and geo-fenced notification system, focusing on spatial indexing, staleness filtering, scalable fan-out, and hotspot mitigation.
System DesignTechnical Screensystem-designgeospatialdistributed-systems - FordMediumSoftware EngineerDesign EV Telemetry Monitoring App
This question evaluates skills in designing real-time telemetry systems, including vehicle data collection and transmission, backend ingestion and validation, API and frontend design, operational controls for per-vehicle data flow, and the incorporation of AI-assisted development into the engineering process.
System DesignTechnical Screen - Garner HealthMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Concurrent Appointment Booking System
Design a concurrent healthcare appointment scheduling system that prevents double booking, supports fast availability searches, and ensures reliable notifications and state auditability.
System DesignTechnical Screensystem-designconcurrencydistributed-systems - Garner HealthMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Doctor Appointment Booking System for Sudden Demand
Design a doctor appointment system with searchable availability, atomic booking, cancellation, and protection against double booking. The follow-up examines a vaccine-demand spike through waiting-room admission, fairness, throttling, hot-slot partitioning, caching, autoscaling, load shedding, and reconciliation.
System DesignTechnical Screen - GeneralmotorsMediumSoftware EngineerChoose Between a Monolith, Microservices, and a Modular Architecture
Compare monolithic and service-based architectures and plan incremental extraction or consolidation around domain boundaries, data ownership, and measured goals.
System DesignTechnical Screen - GoogleMediumSoftware EngineerDesign A Drive-Style Usage Quota Limiter
Design a distributed storage quota accounting and enforcement service for a cloud drive platform that handles concurrent multi-part uploads, deletions, retries, and usage drift reconciliation.
System DesignTechnical ScreenDistributed SystemsCloud StorageConcurrency - GoogleMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Security Monitoring Framework
Design a scalable, low-overhead security monitoring framework capable of capturing OS-level events via eBPF across a massive cloud fleet, streaming telemetry, and detecting malicious activity in near-real-time.
System DesignTechnical ScreenSecurityeBPFStreaming - GoogleHardSoftware EngineerDesign a Task Scheduler for Opaque Long-Running GPU Jobs ("Design Sora")
This question tests your ability to design a distributed job scheduler and execution engine for long-running, compute-intensive GPU workloads. It evaluates distributed system fundamentals including multi-tenant fairness, gang scheduling, node failure recovery, and resource utilization.
System DesignTechnical ScreenDistributed SystemsGPU SchedulingResource Management - GoogleHardSoftware EngineerDesign a key-value store
This question tests the ability to design a distributed, scalable, and fault-tolerant key-value store while addressing challenges related to data distribution, consistency, and storage engine implementation.
System DesignTechnical ScreenDistributed SystemsStorageScalability - GoogleHardSoftware EngineerDesign a prioritized log manager with eviction
Design a prioritized log manager with eviction 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 - GoogleMediumSoftware EngineerDesign at-least-once notification delivery
This question evaluates expertise in reliable distributed systems design, including at-least-once delivery semantics, idempotency and deduplication strategies, retry and dead-letter handling, API and message-schema design, ordering and out-of-order handling, and scalability for high-throughput multi-tenant notification platforms.
System DesignTechnical Screen - GoogleHardSoftware EngineerDesign deduplicated file storage on filesystem
This question evaluates system design and storage engineering competencies, including multi-tenant isolation, authentication and authorization models, content-addressable storage and deduplication, reference counting and garbage collection, concurrency control, API surface design, and scaling across nodes using only filesystem primitives.
System DesignTechnical Screen - GoogleHardSoftware EngineerDesign distributed log storage service
This question evaluates a candidate's expertise in designing distributed storage systems, covering partitioned append-only logs, high-throughput writes and reads, replication, retention, indexing, compaction, leader/follower roles, and recovery mechanisms.
System DesignTechnical Screen - GoogleHardSoftware EngineerDesign distributed transactions protocol
This question evaluates a candidate's understanding of distributed transactions, coordination protocols, fault tolerance, consistency, and reliability across microservices and databases.
System DesignTechnical Screen - GoogleHardSoftware EngineerDesign executable notebook service APIs
This question evaluates a candidate's competence in designing secure, scalable systems for executing user-supplied code, covering API design, sandboxing and isolation, dependency management, resource limits, scheduling, and streaming proxies for logs/results.
System DesignTechnical Screen - GoogleHardSoftware EngineerDesign high-throughput event subscription system
This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design scalable, fault-tolerant event ingestion and subscription architectures, covering distributed systems, high-throughput messaging, content-based filtering, multi-tenant isolation, API/webhook design, delivery semantics, backpressure, sharding, security, and operational observability.
System DesignTechnical Screen - GoogleHardSoftware EngineerDesign key management service
This question evaluates system design and security competencies—specifically cryptographic key lifecycle management, HSM integration, access control, auditing, multi-tenant isolation, and scalability—within the System Design domain.
System DesignTechnical Screen - GoogleMediumSoftware EngineerDesign nearest-available-taxi lookup with updates
This question assesses the ability to design a high-concurrency geospatial system that maintains real-time state for moving entities and supports low-latency queries.
System DesignTechnical ScreenGeospatialScalabilityCaching - GoogleHardSoftware EngineerDesign quota enforcement for high concurrency
This question evaluates a candidate's understanding of distributed system design and engineering competencies related to quota enforcement, high-throughput rate limiting, consistency models, sharding, and concurrency control under very high QPS.
System DesignTechnical Screen
Expedia
Figma
Google