practice a little every day, paws crossed ♡
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 211–240 of 517 results
- GoogleHardSoftware EngineerDesign relational-to-NoSQL migration pipeline
This question evaluates a candidate's competency in designing a relational-to-NoSQL migration pipeline, covering distributed systems and data engineering concepts such as consistent snapshotting, change-data-capture, per-key ordering, idempotency, exactly-once behavior, schema evolution, partitioning, and operational reliability.
System DesignTechnical Screen - GoogleHardSoftware EngineerDesign street-view image ingestion and storage system
This question tests the ability to design a high-throughput, fault-tolerant ingestion pipeline for massive geospatial media, focusing on distributed storage strategies, data integrity, and efficient retrieval at scale.
System DesignTechnical ScreenScalabilitySpatial IndexingData Ingestion - GoogleHardSoftware EngineerDesign viewing history and resume service
This question evaluates a candidate's ability in large-scale system design, covering distributed state management, API design, data modeling for per-user progress, idempotent update semantics, cross-device synchronization, and privacy/compliance considerations.
System DesignTechnical Screen - GoogleMediumSoftware EngineerHow to host many domains on one IP?
Evaluates knowledge of DNS, HTTP/HTTPS request routing, TLS certificate management, and operational/security trade-offs when hosting multiple domains on a single public IP. Commonly asked to probe architectural reasoning and practical deployment trade-offs in the System Design domain at an architectural/operational level of abstraction.
System DesignTechnical Screen - GrammarlyMediumSoftware EngineerDesign Disappearing Direct Messages
Design an ephemeral direct messaging system that reliably deletes messages after viewing across multiple devices, handles offline delivery, and balances user privacy with abuse reporting.
System DesignTechnical Screensystem-designdistributed-systemsmessaging - GrammarlyMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Figma-like collaborative editor
This question evaluates a candidate's ability in designing real-time collaborative systems, covering concurrency control (OT/CRDT trade-offs), low-latency messaging, data modeling, persistence, client-server synchronization, and fault tolerance for unreliable networks.
System DesignTechnical Screen - GrammarlyMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a restaurant reservation system
This question assesses the ability to design a distributed reservation system that handles high concurrency, prevents double-booking, and ensures data consistency.
System DesignTechnical ScreenConcurrencyDatabase ModelingDistributed Systems - GustoMediumSoftware EngineerDesign restaurant shift scheduling
This problem tests your ability to design a scalable scheduling system, specifically focusing on data modeling for temporal availability, handling conflicting shift assignments, and API design for concurrent updates.
System DesignTechnical ScreenConcurrencyData ModelingScalability - HackerRankMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a URL Shortener
This question assesses the ability to design a URL shortening service (like Bitly) focusing on scalability, distributed ID generation, and efficient data retrieval.
System DesignTechnical ScreenScalabilityDatabaseCaching - HarveyMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Cloud File Storage Service
This question evaluates competency in designing large-scale distributed file storage and collaboration systems, covering storage and metadata modeling, API design, synchronization and consistency models, resumable large-file handling, versioning, access control, scalability, availability, durability, and security.
System DesignTechnical Screen - HarveyHardSoftware EngineerDesign a production file storage service
This question evaluates a candidate's competency in distributed systems and storage architecture, covering metadata schema design, concurrency control for atomic per-directory limits and renaming, transaction boundaries and idempotency, storage models for file bytes, large-file handling, consistency and failure modes, scalability and partitioning, observability, lifecycle management, and security. It is in the System Design domain and is commonly asked because it reveals how a candidate reasons about architectural trade-offs and practical implementation concerns; it tests both high-level conceptual design and hands-on practical application.
System DesignTechnical Screen - HarveyHardSoftware EngineerDetermine identical files ignoring metadata
A Harvey AI system design screen on determining whether two files are byte-identical while ignoring metadata, then scaling to deduplication. It covers hashing algorithm choice (SHA-256/BLAKE3 vs MD5/xxHash), multi-stage verification, collision and false-positive mitigation, streaming and parallel hashing, content-defined chunking, and persistent hash-index/service design.
System DesignTechnical Screen - HeadwayMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Rental Search and Booking Platform from Startup to Scale
Design a short-term rental search and booking system, balancing eventual consistency in search discovery with strict consistency during reservations and checkout.
System DesignTechnical Screensystem-designconcurrencydistributed-systems - HeadwayMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Shopping Cart Service That Keeps Inventory Consistent Under Concurrency
Design the backend for an online store's shopping cart, with the focus on inventory consistency: when stock is reserved, how two shoppers racing for the last unit are resolved, and how abandoned holds are released. It tests data modeling, concurrency control, checkout failure handling and contention on popular items.
System DesignTechnical Screen - HeadwayMediumSoftware EngineerHandle traffic spikes and estimate server capacity
This question evaluates a candidate's competency in performance troubleshooting, capacity planning, and scalable system architecture, focusing on diagnosing overload causes and quantifying infrastructure needs.
System DesignTechnical Screen - ImcMediumSoftware EngineerDesign an in-memory hotel booking system
This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design in-memory data models, concurrency control mechanisms, and temporal reservation logic for booking systems.
System DesignTechnical Screen - InstacartMediumSoftware EngineerDesign an Inventory Service with Stock Reservations That Prevents Overselling
A system design discussion of an inventory service that reserves stock for orders, centered on reservations, concurrent updates and preventing overselling. It probes how stock and holds are modeled, how a reservation stays atomic under contention, how abandoned holds are released and how hot items scale.
System DesignTechnical Screen - J.P. MorganMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a URL shortener
This question assesses the ability to design a distributed URL shortening service, focusing on database schema design, collision resolution, and caching strategies for high-read throughput.
System DesignTechnical ScreenCachingDatabasesHashing - J.P. MorganEasySoftware EngineerDesign an Auditable Internal AI Chatbot
Design an enterprise RAG-based AI assistant that enforces role-based document access control, bounds conversation history, mitigates prompt injection, and maintains an immutable, compliance-grade audit trail.
System DesignTechnical ScreenRAGSecurityCompliance - J.P. MorganMediumSoftware EngineerDesign an E-Commerce Shopping Website
This problem tests your ability to design a scalable, consistent backend architecture for an e-commerce platform, focusing on inventory management, order processing, and high-read traffic handling.
System DesignTechnical ScreenScalabilityDatabaseMicroservices - J.P. MorganMediumMachine Learning EngineerDesign an Entitlement-Aware Agentic Portfolio Workflow
This problem tests the ability to architect an LLM-based agentic system that balances autonomous task execution with strict role-based access control (RBAC) and auditability.
System DesignTechnical ScreenAgentic WorkflowSecurityLLM - Jain GlobalMediumData EngineerDesign an Incremental Rolling-Metrics Data Pipeline
Design an incremental batch data pipeline to compute multi-horizon rolling financial metrics over daily ticker observations, handling bounded historical restatements, atomic publication, and data reconciliation.
System DesignTechnical ScreenData EngineeringData PipelinesFinancial Data - Jain GlobalMediumData EngineerDesign and Debug a Point-in-Time Backtest Data Pipeline
This problem tests the ability to architect a robust financial data pipeline that ensures point-in-time accuracy and reproducible research.
System DesignTechnical ScreenData EngineeringFinancial DataBacktesting - Jain GlobalMediumData EngineerModel Effective-Dated Compliance Restrictions for Securities
This question tests the ability to design a time-series database schema capable of handling bitemporal data, identifier changes, and overlapping compliance restrictions.
System DesignTechnical ScreenData ModelingTime-SeriesBitemporal - Jane StreetHardMachine Learning EngineerDesign and implement a tiny language runtime
Design and implement a tiny language runtime 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 - Jane StreetHardMachine Learning EngineerImplement compiler for custom language
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 Implement compiler for custom language states assumptions, handles edge cases, explains trade-offs, and shows how to validate the result clearly.
System DesignTechnical Screen - Jane StreetMediumSoftware EngineerProcess One Million Quote Updates per Second
Design a low-latency market data processing engine capable of ingesting 1,000,000 quote updates per second across multiple exchanges, maintaining global best bids and asks, and triggering immediate cross-venue arbitrage alerts.
System DesignTechnical ScreenLow LatencyConcurrencyTrading Systems - LatentHardSoftware EngineerAdd Status, Pharmacist Worklists, and Digests to Prior Authorization
Design an event-driven prior authorization platform supporting real-time status tracking, prioritized pharmacist worklists, and scheduled email digests powered by asynchronous payer integrations.
System DesignTechnical ScreenEvent-DrivenHealthcareDistributed Systems - LeagueMediumSoftware EngineerDesign scalable insurance claims processing system
Walks through designing a scalable insurance claims processing system: ingestion, validation, routing, and the reliability and consistency trade-offs. Includes a worked system design solution.
System DesignTechnical Screen - LinkedInMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Calendar System
Tests your ability to design a scalable calendar backend that supports single and recurring events, attendee invitations, and time-based reminder notifications with timezone awareness.
System DesignTechnical ScreenDistributed SystemsData ModelingScheduling
Google
Grammarly
Gusto
Harvey
Imc
Instacart
J.P. Morgan
Jane Street
LinkedIn