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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 1–13 of 13 results

AirtableMediumSoftware Engineer
Design a lazy-initialized connection pool
Design a thread-safe, lazily initialized connection pool with a PooledConnection wrapper: reuse idle connections first, cap active connections, define exhaustion (block-with-timeout) and shutdown semantics, and analyze concurrency safety and complexity. A common Airtable software-engineering screen question.
System DesignHR Screen
ByteDanceMediumData Engineer
Design a Data Service for Downstream Consumers
Design a centralized, governed data serving platform that provides downstream consumers with stable query APIs, schema evolution safety, cursor-based exports, and data freshness metadata.
System DesignHR ScreenData EngineeringAPI DesignData Governance
DatabricksHardSoftware Engineer
Design a thread-safe bounded queue
This question evaluates skills in concurrent programming, synchronization primitives, and designing thread-safe bounded data structures that support blocking operations with timeouts, fairness, and backpressure.
System DesignHR Screen
DatabricksHardSoftware Engineer
Design concurrent range-aware file caching client
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 concurrent range-aware file caching client states assumptions, handles edge cases, explains trade-offs, and shows how to validate the result clearly.
System DesignHR Screen
FigmaHardSoftware Engineer
Design and operate a monolith on Kubernetes
This question evaluates a candidate's competency in designing and operating a monolithic application on Kubernetes, covering platform engineering topics such as deployment topology, networking and traffic management, CI/CD and rollout strategies, resource management and autoscaling, stateful dependencies, observability, incident response, and disaster recovery. Commonly asked in System Design interviews to assess practical application of distributed systems and SRE principles—specifically the ability to reason about operational trade-offs, reliability, and incremental migration paths—this prompt sits in the System Design domain and emphasizes practical application with architectural reasoning rather than purely conceptual understanding.
System DesignHR Screen
InstacartMediumSoftware Engineer
Design an inventory system
This question evaluates a candidate's competency in designing inventory and distributed systems, covering stock tracking models, reservation and commit semantics, concurrency control, data modeling, API design, and real-time integrations.
System DesignHR Screen
LambdaHardSoftware Engineer
Design and explain infra, K8s, routing, and fleet
This question evaluates system design and infrastructure engineering skills, including Infrastructure-as-Code and CI/CD for bare-metal and Kubernetes, secrets management, idempotency and drift control, Kubernetes control-plane and workload management, edge firmware and fleet OTA management, IP routing and troubleshooting, and the ability to demonstrate automation, networking, observability, and security through a homelab. It is commonly asked to assess operational design thinking, scalability, security, reliability, and troubleshooting across distributed systems, falls under the System Design and Platform Engineering domain, and tests both conceptual understanding of control-plane and networking principles and practical application of operational guardrails and rollout strategies.
System DesignHR Screen
MetaHardSoftware Engineer
Design a bank system with transfers
This question evaluates system-design and transactional engineering skills for financial services, including API design, data modeling, correctness under holds and transfer expirations, idempotency, merge semantics, and complexity reasoning.
System DesignHR Screen
NextdoorHardSoftware Engineer
Describe CAP, distributed systems, multithreading experience
This question evaluates practical and theoretical competence in the CAP theorem, distributed system architecture, and multithreaded concurrency, covering consistency models, partition tolerance, fault tolerance, scaling strategies, synchronization primitives, and debugging/performance techniques.
System DesignHR Screen
OpenAIHardSoftware Engineer
Prevent Duplicate Request Processing
This System Design question evaluates understanding of idempotency, request deduplication, client- and server-side reliability mechanisms, and concurrency control in distributed systems.
System DesignHR Screen
RipplingHardSoftware Engineer
Design several large-scale systems
This question tests the ability to design a distributed, high-concurrency reservation system that requires strong consistency for inventory management and low-latency read access for search.
System DesignHR ScreenScalabilityConcurrencyConsistency
TeslaMediumSoftware Engineer
Balance 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 Engineer
Design synchronization for water molecule assembly
This question evaluates concurrency and synchronization skills, including thread coordination, use of locks/semaphores/condition variables, and reasoning about safety and liveness properties in concurrent systems.
System DesignHR Screen