Interview questions

Design social media privacy and audience controls

Post access across cached and replicated content: blocks, audience changes, strict revocation, and popular posts.

General practice

authorization · caching · consistency · failure-handling

Design TikTok

Personalized swipe feed: safe video publication, fast playback startup, and fresh feedback at media-delivery scale.

General practice

asynchronous-processing · cdn · event-streaming · feed-pagination

Design Trello

Shared boards with concurrent card moves, real-time updates, and workspace access rules that apply to requests and live connections.

General practice

access-control · atomic-changes · card-order · concurrent-edits

Design Twitch

Live video at large scale: broadcast delay, uneven audiences, playback quality, and recovery after ingest failures.

General practice

audience-scale-delivery · broadcast-latency · broadcast-recovery · live-video

Design Twitter

Celebrity traffic, follow changes, and post deletion make a complete home timeline hard to serve within a fixed latency target.

General practice

celebrity-traffic · home-timeline · pagination · post-deletion

Design Uber surge pricing

Live spatial pricing: count demand and supply correctly, avoid unstable multipliers, and honor quotes while prices keep changing.

Companies: Lyft, Uber

event-time · geospatial-partitioning · idempotency · pricing-stability

Design Wikipedia or Notion

Versioned documents: concurrent saves, durable history, global caching, and safe page-tree changes.

Companies: Amazon, Flipkart, Google, Notion

access-control · content-delivery · hierarchical-data · optimistic-concurrency

Design Zoom

Live group calls require low delay, bandwidth control, enforced participant permissions, and recovery after regional failures.

General practice

bandwidth-limits · client-connectivity · media-paths · participant-controls

Lots of system design (not leetcode). API integration was just time constrained.

Companies: Stripe

LRU Cache System Design LLD

LRU Cache System Design LLD

Companies: Microsoft

Please explain me this project that you worked in your past X company and also make me understand the whole system design flow and how you navigated from the front end to back end and also explain the thought process for the cloud architecture used and why a SQL v. NoSQL was used.

Please explain me this project that you worked in your past X company and also make me understand the whole system design flow and how…

Companies: Apple

Present a recent project with big scale and cross-functional involvement.

Companies: Anthropic

Structure noisy pod alerts and detect unhealthy replicas

Design a pipeline that converts irregular pod alert history into structured records. Compare a pod with sibling replicas to identify unhealthy behavior.

Companies: Baseten

Anomaly Detection · Data Pipelines · Observability

System Design + coding + algo + cross-functional

Companies: Databricks

System Design for the Tinder App

Companies: Palantir

System design related to a file data parser

Companies: Jane Street

System design they asked slack deep dive

Companies: OpenAI

System design years of experience

Companies: Snap

System design: Design Github Actions from scratch.

Companies: OpenAI

To design a system that handles tickets

Companies: Amazon

typical system design questions + software

Companies: Jane Street

Web crawler -- was part coding and part system design

Companies: Anthropic