System design questions by company

Questions candidates have reported from big tech onsites, grouped by company. SysRound isn't affiliated with these companies and doesn't use their real questions or rubrics.

• Google16 questionsThe Google questions here lean toward infrastructure: storage engines, key-value stores, job scheduling, sorting data that doesn't fit on one machine, and moving data between systems. Most of them turn on correctness under failure and on the numbers.Design a metrics monitoring system like Datadog, Design a distributed key-value store, Design Google Calendar, Design Google Analytics
• Amazon14 questionsThe Amazon questions here cluster around queues and logs, top K and counting at scale, and practical product systems like hotel booking and photo storage. Durability, retries and duplicate handling come up in most of them.Design a metrics monitoring system like Datadog, Design a distributed message log like Kafka, Design a top K trending system, Design a distributed message queue like RabbitMQ
• Meta12 questionsThe Meta questions here are mostly product systems at very high fan-out: likes, live comments, marketplace, price alerts and ads. Hot keys, counters and real-time delivery to many viewers are the recurring hard parts.Design a metrics monitoring system like Datadog, Design a top K trending system, Design Google Analytics, Design Dropbox or Google Drive
• Uber7 questionsThe Uber questions here are about location and time: ETAs, live location sharing, surge pricing, plus the operational side with tracing, metrics and on-call escalation. Geospatial indexing and streaming updates come up often.Design a metrics monitoring system like Datadog, Design Uber surge pricing, Design an ETA and live location sharing service, Design a weather app

Looking for the classics, like a URL shortener, Uber or WhatsApp? See all system design questions.