Interview questions

Heavy focus on system design

Companies: Snap

Last reported May 2023

Three programming interviews (including phone screen). One of them was an annoying leetcode-y question with a trick (which I didn't see) but the other two were reasonable. Two system design interviews. I got the sense the interviewers wanted specific answers that matched how they'd solved those problems. Some behavioural questions but no interview focused on this (unusual to not focus on this for an L6 role).

Three programming interviews (including phone screen). One of them was an annoying leetcode-y question with a trick (which I didn't see) but the other two…

Companies: Snap

Last reported Apr 2023

- 1st round was simple 1D dp problem - 2nd round was graph problem (Djikstra's) and ML system design

- 1st round was simple 1D dp problem - 2nd round was graph problem (Djikstra's) and ML system design

Companies: TikTok

coding system design behavior technical deep dive

coding system design behavior technical deep dive

Companies: Anthropic

coding: I forgot, sorry system design: design ticketmaster culture: talk about past project; when you disagreed with a peer; how I resolved dissagreements, etc.

coding: I forgot, sorry system design: design ticketmaster culture: talk about past project; when you disagreed with a peer; how I resolved dissagreements, etc.

Companies: Meta

Data structures and algorithms followed by system design

Companies: LinkedIn

Design a AI-Powered Daily Briefing System

Design a backend system for a AI-powered daily briefing feature that scans a user's inbox, Calendar, and Tasks to generate personalized daily and weekly goal…

General practice

Design a bank account aggregator like Plaid

Bank data integration: different bank APIs, transaction changes, consent revocation, and sync progress across failures.

General practice

api-integration · consent-management · data-normalization · idempotency

Design a batch processing system like MapReduce

Large dataset execution: task placement, data movement, uneven partitions, and recovery after worker or coordinator failures.

General practice

batch-processing · distributed-execution · fault-tolerance · resource-management

Design a BI dashboard platform like Tableau

Interactive dashboards over slow analytical sources, with source limits, data age, and separate dashboard and dataset access.

General practice

access-control · analytical-queries · long-running-queries-and-recovery · multi-tenancy

Design a BigQuery analytics agent

Natural-language analytics over BigQuery: grounding SQL in business meaning, enforcing user permissions, controlling query costs, and recovering long-running tool calls.

Companies: Reddit

agent-orchestration · text-to-sql · data-access-control · query-planning

Design a block storage service like Amazon EBS

Persistent VM volumes with durable write acknowledgments, safe access after failures, and low latency during repair.

General practice

attachment-ownership · block-storage · data-placement · durability

Design a browser sync service

Concurrent edits across offline devices, deletion safety, history expiry, and device tab visibility.

General practice

concurrent-edits · data-retention · device-presence · idempotency

Design a calorie tracking app like MyFitnessPal

A large food catalog with portion conversions, stable meal history, and consistent edits across devices.

General practice

concurrency · data-modeling · request-retries · search

Design a CAPTCHA service like reCAPTCHA

High-volume human checks with low user effort, single-use proofs, and strict customer boundaries.

General practice

attacker-generated-load · consistency · customer-boundaries · human-effort

Design a car rental platform

Vehicle reservations across time intervals, with preparation time, hold deadlines, late returns, and durable confirmations.

General practice

availability-search · hold-deadlines · interval-conflicts · reservation-durability

Design a certificate transparency log

Public certificate log: efficient proofs, publication promises, failure tolerance, and independent evidence of conflicting histories.

General practice

append-only-history · cryptographic-proofs · equivocation · failure-tolerance

Design a change data capture system

Coordinate a consistent snapshot with a change stream, preserve committed changes through failures, and enforce source storage limits.

General practice

backpressure · change-data-capture · database-snapshots · delivery-semantics

Design a chat app like WhatsApp

Stateful connections, routing between chat servers, offline delivery, receipts, ordering, group fan-out, media via object storage.

General practice

offline-delivery · ordering · presence · pub-sub

Design a CI platform like GitHub Actions

A platform that executes untrusted code, respects job dependencies, and shares limited capacity fairly across repositories.

General practice

artifact-storage · dependency-graphs · execution-isolation · fault-tolerance

Design a cloud contact center

A voice service with shared agent capacity, caller queues, call transfers, and delayed events from an external voice provider.

General practice

call-routing · concurrency · event-ordering · failure-recovery

Design a cloud IAM authorization service

Cloud permission checks: inherited rules, consent between accounts, and a fixed deadline for permission revocation.

General practice

access-control · cache-consistency · cross-account-access · multi-region