Big Tech Loves These 45 System Design Questions—Do You Have the Answers?

mrarup824 hours ago

0 1 7 minutes read

Let’s face it, system design is painful.

With Leetcode questions, you know the drill — find the algorithm, explain it, code it.

With system design, you never know what’ll be asked. Which makes it hard to practice.

I was in the same boat. So I did a bunch of research and found questions that are being asked but not available easily. Other popular websites give you 12 or so questions to practice, but those are saturated now – everyone knows them.

*** drumroll ***

Here are the 45 questions I found and used, along with solutions and company names where they were asked.

I am constantly updating and improving this list. Please visit SystemDesign.io for the latest version.

Question 1: Design a Distributed Metrics Logging and Aggregation System

Company(s) asked: Google, Facebook, Amazon, eBay, Datadog, Atlassian

Solution(s):

Detailed Solution from Google Engineer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_q-n09B8KA

Good overview from Google Engineer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KoiMoZZ3C8

Related — Ad Click Aggregation: https://www.hellointerview.com/learn/system-design/problem-breakdowns/ad-click-aggregator

Leetcode Discussion: https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-question/system-design/622704/Design-a-system-to-store-and-retrieve-logs-for-all-of-eBay

Question 2: Design a Distributed Stream Processing System like Kafka

Company(s) asked: Amazon, Microsoft, Wise, Confluent

Solution(s):

Read the original Kafka paper, but don’t feel pressured to complete it: https://notes.stephenholiday.com/Kafka.pdf

Great overview: https://medium.com/better-programming/system-design-series-apache-kafka-from-10-000-feet-9c95af56f18d

Solution from Meta Engineer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DU8o-OTeoCc

Good visualization: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZklgPkboro

Question 3: Design a Key-Value Store

Company(s) asked: Apple, Google, Canva, Avalara, Rubrik, OpenDoor

Solution(s):

Good high level solution: https://www.educative.io/courses/grokking-the-system-design-interview/design-of-a-key-value-store

Mock Interview with Microsoft Engineer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fOoXT1HYxk

Detailed Video Series on this: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1MM4yIzUdPm2L_Lz8gRa_q6ZElgNoArH

Question 4: Identify the K Most Shared Articles in Various Time Windows (24 hours, 1 hour, 5 minutes)

Company(s) asked: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter

Solution(s):

Leetcode discussion: https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-question/system-design/258398/design-top-shared-post-system-in-5mins1-hour1-day1-week

Official Google Mock Interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1DvEdR0iUo

Great high level overview: https://mecha-mind.medium.com/system-design-top-k-trending-hashtags-4e12de5bb846

Solution from Meta Engineer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lfktgZ9Eeo

Text solution: https://www.hellointerview.com/learn/system-design/problem-breakdowns/top-k

Question 5: Design an API Rate Limiter

Company(s) asked: Amazon, Atlassian, Uber, Patreon, Microsoft, Stripe, Headway, Reputation.com, Pinterest

Solution(s):

Great article + mock interview video: https://www.tryexponent.com/blog/rate-limiter-system-design

Great solution by Google engineer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzW41m4USGs

Intro: https://blog.bytebytego.com/p/rate-limiting-fundamentals

Good article on algorithms: https://medium.com/geekculture/system-design-design-a-rate-limiter-81d200c9d392

Leetcode discussion: https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-question/system-design/1616482/System-Design%3A-Rate-Limiter

Question 6: System to Collect Performance Metrics from Thousands of Servers

Company(s) asked: Google, Datadog, Amazon, eBay, LinkedIn

Solution(s):

Good solution: https://systemdesignschool.io/problems/realtime-monitoring-system/solution

Nice article with overview: https://archive.is/Eezec

Question 7: Design Google Calendar

Company(s) asked: Google, LinkedIn

Solution(s):

Good High Level Solution: https://medium.com/%40astha2798/system-design-google-calendar-94894ddc9839

Solution from FAANG Engineer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POfW0UULcyA

Leetcode Discussion: https://leetcode.com/discuss/post/305654/system-design-google-calendar-by-kthtes-ttur/

Recurring Events: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/tiny-system-design-google-calendar-like-app-recurring-rajesh-pillai/

Question 8: Design a Distributed Queue like RabbitMQ

Company(s) asked: Amazon, Apple, Instacart

Solution(s):

Leetcode Discussion: https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-question/system-design/206134/Amazon-or-System-Design-or-Design-a-Distributed-Message-queue

Good detailed explanation: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pOarvQbjzLd9tz5ZuxktyrYsZ41mbWba5_LUeFj65lI/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.iq7ofd902vlf

Mock Interview: https://www.tryexponent.com/blog/distributed-message-queue-system-design-mock-interview

Detailed explanation video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJLL-KPqBpM

Question 9: Design Google Analytics — User Analytics Dashboard and Pipeline

Company(s) asked: Microsoft, Facebook, Qualtrics, Google

Solution(s):

Leetcode: https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-question/system-design/562404/system-designmicrosoft-real-time-analytics

Facebook EM’s Mock Interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIcq1_pBQSY

Designing a Dashboard with Data with FAANG Engineer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_5Gve7aNRk

Question 10: Design a System for Sorting Large Data Sets

Company(s) asked: Google, Microsoft

Solution(s):
Excellent solution:https://quanticdev.com/algorithms/distributed-computing/distributed-sorting/

From the same author, a very detailed video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgKjatRVtys

Leetcode: https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-question/4807845/Microsoft-Interview/

Question 11: Top K Elements: App Store Rankings, Amazon Bestsellers, etc.

Company(s) asked: Amazon, Bloomberg, Facebook, Pinterest

Solution(s):
Solution from ex-Meta engineer:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lfktgZ9Eeo

Solution from FAANG Engineer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvZbdYvrFeg

Very detailed solution from Microsoft engineer: https://serhatgiydiren.com/system-design-interview-top-k-problem-heavy-hitters/

Solution on Blind: https://www.teamblind.com/post/Please-critique-my-system-design-for-Top-K-most-searched-terms-Cfrqhnhk

Question 12: Design Dropbox or Google Drive

Company(s) asked: Dropbox, Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, OCI

Solution(s):
Paper: Google File System__https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//archive/gfs-sosp2003.pdf__

Solution from ex-Meta Engineer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UZ1ngy-kOI

https://www.hellointerview.com/learn/system-design/problem-breakdowns/dropbox

Mock Interview: https://www.tryexponent.com/courses/system-design-interviews/design-dropbox

Question 13: Design a Job Scheduler

Company(s) asked: Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Doordash, Netflix, Atlassian

Solution(s):
Popular Leetcode Discussion:https://leetcode.com/discuss/general-discussion/1082786/System-Design%3A-Designing-a-distributed-Job-Scheduler-or-Many-interesting-concepts-to-learn

Solution from Google Engineer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzDwYHRzEnk

High Level Overview: https://blog.algomaster.io/p/design-a-distributed-job-scheduler

Mock Interview: https://interviewing.io/mocks/faang-system-design-job-scheduler

Question 14: Design a Notification Service at Scale

Company(s) asked: Google, Pinterest, OCI, Stubhub, Amazon, Airbnb, Instacart

Solution(s):
High level overview:https://blog.algomaster.io/p/design-a-scalable-notification-service

Good design by Microsoft engineer: https://serhatgiydiren.com/system-design-interview-notification-service/

Nice detailed solution video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBTPZ9NdSk8

Solution by Google Engineer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-5JozlYIqI

Question 15: Surge Pricing System: Uber — Stream Processing, etc.

Company(s) asked: Uber, Lyft

Solution(s):
No solutions available online, but here is the best we could find:

Good overview: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uJpPuhO6vZK_VCxBYKbCJoQYrbFE9Ihrsfs919X8f40/edit?usp=sharing

GPTed Solution I used: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hfUmr8SpBMCkEMlOeXl6Y-H85PMzq-zd07Isb1ltWZE/edit?usp=sharing

Question 16: Netflix: Limit the Number of Screens Each User Can Watch

Company(s) asked: Some FAANG

Solution(s):
No solutions available online, but here is the best we could find:

On Mobile and TVs, Because you are running the app, you have access to certain device identifiers. For example, on iOS, you can get the phone model, and advertising identifier for a device. You can use this data to record a device on a backend cache.

On web, you can use the IP address and create a browser session. You can use that as a key to a table maintaining sessions for a user.

With a combination of the above, you can identify how many users are watching from an account at any given time.

Company(s) asked: Uber, Some FAANG

Solution(s):
No solutions available online, but here are some reads:
Note: This is after matching a driver with a rider — Question 30.

Part 1 — ETA:

ETA for Uber Eats, related: https://mecha-mind.medium.com/ml-system-design-eta-prediction-9dc8000fd86b
High level approach:https://www.finalroundai.com/interview-questions/google-maps-eta-compute

Part 2 – Live location sharing:

Links that are ok, but don’t do justice for interviews:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/building-live-location-tracking-app-best-practices-real-time-das-cuujc/

https://github.com/praveenkumardec89/location-tracking-system-design

Question 18: Design a Hotel Booking System: Room Availability, Reservation, Booking

Company(s) asked: Amazon, Square, Booking.com

Solution(s):
Solution from FAANG Engineer:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ale7Fn921GQ

Good API and High Level Design: https://javascript.plainenglish.io/how-to-design-a-hotel-booking-system-56ef18b6adfc

High Level Backend Design Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m67Mjbx6DMY

Mock Interview: https://www.tryexponent.com/blog/design-a-hotel-booking-service-system-design-interview-question-answer

Question 19: Design an A/B Testing System (like Optimizely)

Company(s) asked: Affirm, Some FAANG

Solution(s):
No good solutions for this online. Here are a few reads:

Good design: https://chuan-zhang.medium.com/building-a-trustworthy-a-b-testing-platform-practical-guide-and-an-architecture-demonstration-332446724ba0

High level overview: https://xhinliang.medium.com/how-to-design-an-a-b-test-system-1450b06933f

Building a small homemade A/B test engine: https://medium.com/studocu-techblog/recipe-for-implementing-a-homemade-a-b-testing-engine-2e95c97c8020

Question 20: Design a Price Alert System for Amazon (or for Stock prices)

Company(s) asked: Facebook, Bloomberg, Coinbase, Swyftx, Trade Republic

Solution(s):
Leetcode Discussion:https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-question/system-design/5745135/Design-Stock-price-Notification-System

Good solutions: https://dilipkumar.medium.com/price-drop-tracker-system-design-d2f9ed36a935

Another solution: https://www.tryexponent.com/questions/3371/design-amazon-price-tracker

Question 21: Design an IoC/Dependency Injection Framework

Company(s) asked: ADP, Some FAANG

Solution(s):
No good solution available online, here is the best we could find:

Intro to concepts: https://tarunjain07.medium.com/inversion-of-control-ioc-dependency-injection-di-9155a4151db9

More info: https://www.finalroundai.com/blog/dependency-injection-interview-questions

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryI8CA7Dbx8

Question 22: Design a Credit Card Processing System

Company(s) asked: Stripe, Paytm, Paypal, Databricks, Capital One

Solution(s):
Detailed solution:https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/designing-a-payment-system

Simpler solution: https://hackernoon.com/system-design-interview-designing-payment-systems-follow-up-questions-and-probable-issues

Good video explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olfaBgJrUBI

Question 23: Count Facebook Likes, Especially for High-Profile Users

Company(s) asked: Facebook, Amazon, Twitter

Solution(s):
Discussion on Blind:https://www.teamblind.com/post/System-Design-Question-How-does-FBInsta-storeretrieve-likes-NZEcwqVp

Detailed Solution: https://systemdesign.one/distributed-counter-system-design/

Video Solution: https://blog.interviewcamp.io/live-design-facebook-likes-distributed-counter

Question 24: Design a Control Plane for a Distributed Database

Company(s) asked: Netflix

Solution(s):
No solution online. Here are a few reads:

Good to know what a control plane is. This video does a great job: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ep1QW-wOmgc

DynamoDB Paper: https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/files/amazon-dynamo-sosp2007.pdf

Company(s) asked: Google, Visa, Gusto

Solution(s):
Great explanation:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uj_4vxm9u90

Good solution: https://hackernoon.com/designing-functional-authentication-and-authorization-systems

Good summary: https://www.finalroundai.com/interview-questions/google-design-login-endpoint

Explanation videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyTxwIa-1U0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zt8Cocdy15c

Question 26: Develop a Weather Application

Company(s) asked: Amazon, Chime, Facebook, Hubspot, Uber, Klaviyo

Solution(s):
Leetcode Discussion:https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-question/system-design/1286344/system-design-design-weather-widget

Video explanation with sensors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWNRuClDOo4&t=2s

Another explanation with sensors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxL8W3WoK5k

Question 27: Create a Document Management System like Wikipedia, Notion or Google Docs

Company(s) asked: Google, Flipkart, Notion, Amazon

Solution(s):
No good solutions available online. However, here are some reads:

Leetcode Discussion: https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-question/system-design/322448/Content-Management-System-Design

Solution from Google Engineer. This goes over live editing too, but this specific question is not about live editing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCjVIDv0zQY

Detailed Frontend Design: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsGarhpWOws

Question 28: Build a Marketplace Feature for Facebook

Company(s) asked: Facebook, Roblox

Solution(s):
While no solution exists online specifically for FB Marketplace, here are solutions for building marketplaces which will help:

Cheat Sheet: https://www.reddit.com/r/leetcode/comments/104wf74/system_design_cheatsheet_online_marketplace/

Craigslist Design: https://medium.com/%40bugfreeai/system-design-interview-practice-design-craigslist-c95ba0238f74

Mock Interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2N0TXrgB9AY

For location based listings, refer to geospatial search — Question 30

Question 29: Design a System to Monitor the Health of a Cluster

Company(s) asked: Uber, Lacework, Amazon, Google

Solution(s):
Good starting point: Interview experience:https://medium.com/%40ajingnv/system-design-a-server-health-monitoring-system-9bdd0066bb9c

Solution: https://systemdesignschool.io/problems/realtime-monitoring-system/solution

Leetcode Discussion: https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-question/system-design/958919/System-Design-Interview-or-Service-Health-Monitoring-and-Alerting-Service

Question 30: Find a Rider for Uber or Uber Eats

Company(s) asked: Facebook, Uber, Google, Microsoft

Solution(s):

Very similar to Proximity Service (Find Nearby Friends, Design Yelp). This problem is about maintaining a large geospatial index.

Excellent article on geospatial algorithms: https://blog.mapbox.com/a-dive-into-spatial-search-algorithms-ebd0c5e39d2a

Good solution for Yelp, which applies here: https://systemdesignschool.io/problems/yelp/solution

Popular Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4lR_Va97cQ

Mock Interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atywHEArk1w

Question 31: Design a Distributed Tracing System

Company(s) asked: Uber, Amazon

Solution(s):
Leetcode Discussion:https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-question/system-design/313117/Design-a-system-capable-of-tracking-bad-request-down-quickly

Great intro to Tracing: https://betterstack.com/community/guides/observability/distributed-tracing/

Dapper research paper: https://research.google/pubs/pub36356/

Solution from FAANG engineer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jkhw_FSikX0

Question 32: Design Backend for an App to Distribute 6 Million Free Burgers in One Hour

Company(s) asked: Google, Deliveroo

Solution(s):
No solution online, but here are some resources:

Mock Interview: https://interviewing.io/mocks/google-system-design-design-a-free-food-app

Another Mock Interview: https://interviewing.io/questions/design-a-free-food-app

Reddit discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/softwarearchitecture/comments/xlztzr/interview_systems_design_question_that_i_want/

Question 33: Design a File Downloader Library

Company(s) asked: Facebook

Solution(s):
No good solutions online, but here are a few resources:

Leetcode Discussion: https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-question/system-design/1587255/Facebook-System-Design

Video Solution: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u520bdagKkU

Question 34: Design a System to View Latest Stock Prices Worldwide

Company(s) asked: Google, Bloomberg, Amazon

Solution(s):
Leetcode Discussion:https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-question/system-design/431712/Bloomberg-or-Design-a-system-to-give-prices-of-a-stock

Detailed solution: https://harshsavasil.medium.com/design-real-time-stock-price-feed-9e1fba0a1c4e

Real case study: https://www.paytmmoney.com/blog/how-we-built-an-in-house-price-alerts-system/

Company(s) asked: Google, Doordash, Amazon, Uber, Facebook

Solution(s):
Must read: Facebook’s Photo Storage Paper:https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/osdi10/tech/full_papers/Beaver.pdf

High level approach: https://medium.com/%40bugfreeai/key-points-of-a-common-system-design-interview-question-photo-sharing-platform-91f52fa4bf05

Solution: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/design-a-picture-sharing-system-system-design/

Frontend Solution Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUKGooQXih8

Mock Interview: https://interviewing.io/mocks/faang-system-design-photo-sharing-service

Question 36: Design an On-Call Escalation System

Company(s) asked: Uber

Solution(s):
No solution available online. However, here are things to consider:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yngBZD2xNYfPRMIy1haQQcpSrZLUrIjErIM92d8mFiA/edit?usp=sharing

Question 37: Design and Implement a Wire Transfer API

Company(s) asked: Google, Capital One, Revolut

Solution(s):
Leetcode Discussion:https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-question/1895724/google-first-phone-write-a-wiretransfer-api

https://leetcode.com/discuss/post/651695/revolut-backend-engineer-london-sep-2019-ybf3/

Video Solution: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olfaBgJrUBI&t=365s

Company(s) asked: Facebook

Solution(s):
Great Solution:https://www.hellointerview.com/learn/system-design/problem-breakdowns/fb-live-comments

Video Solution from Meta Engineer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjLx0fCd1k8

FB Engineering Blog: https://engineering.fb.com/2011/02/07/core-infra/live-commenting-behind-the-scenes/

Leetcode Discussion: https://leetcode.com/discuss/post/583184/fbinstagram-live-comments-system-design-fqtzt/

Question 39: Design a Feature to Show the Number of Users Viewing a Page

Company(s) asked: Booking.com

Solution(s):
No solution available online, but here are a few reads:

One solution: https://medium.com/%40narasimha4789/from-zero-to-millions-designing-a-real-time-active-user-counter-system-a5d9545bd35e

Related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuKjdj9YXns

Question 40: Design Facebook Likes Feature with Live Updates

Company(s) asked: Facebook, Coinbase

Solution(s):
Video Solution:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4bmFz-BSDk

Question 41: Create a System to Migrate Large Data to Google Cloud

Company(s) asked: Google, OCI

Solution(s):
No solution online, but here are some reads:

3 strategies: https://newrelic.com/blog/best-practices/migrating-data-to-cloud-avoid-downtime-strategies

Related interview experience: https://leetcode.com/discuss/post/1733573/rubrik-file-transfer-interview-question-43hjl/

Question 42: Design a Distributed Botnet

Company(s) asked: Facebook, Lyft

Solution(s):
MapReduce Paper — which coordinates a cluster of machines to do a task:https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//archive/mapreduce-osdi04.pdf

Leetcode Discussion: https://leetcode.com/discuss/post/1375361/botnet-system-designfacebook-design-roun-jv0g/

https://leetcode.com/discuss/post/850071/lyft-virtual-onsite-design-bots-to-downl-4v5q/

Blind: https://www.teamblind.com/post/System-design-for-Botnet-5x0Mq34z

Question 43: Create a Distributed File Transfer System like Bittorrent

Company(s) asked: Google, Atlassian, Twitch

Solution(s):
Great paper on this topic:https://web.cs.ucla.edu/classes/cs217/05BitTorrent.pdf

Article on this: https://medium.com/@abhinavcv007/bittorrent-part-1-the-engineering-behind-the-bittorrent-protocol-04e70ee01d58

High Level Video Explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PWUCFmOQwQ

Question 44: Design a Parts Compatibility Feature for an eCommerce Site