Engineering Manager System Design Interview Questions

S R. - "Wrote up a simple cache system using python dict. Added TTL requirement. Then went into code-level concurrency issues for the cache."See full answer

Clayton P. - "The interviewer hinted that a two-tower recommender system might be a suitable approach, using user history to embed users and pages separately and train on view or interaction data. Instead, I proposed a different approach that I felt was more aligned with how knowledge is structured in Confluence: I designed a system using a graph database to model the relationships between Confluence pages. Each page is a node, and edges represent content-based references. For example, when one article"See full answer

Aymen D. - "It would have been more interesting to focus on the system design rather than the Trie DS, Interviewee could have just mentioned the Trie and passed to things more important. Interviewee should have focused on the factors on which he wants to scale the API servers, popularity of the query parts ? region may be ? A hash of many factors ? Caches should have definitely be discussed, Cache eviction policies, Cache invalidation managements... Interviewee should have mentioned which kind of API pro"See full answer

Usman B. - "System Components Data Collection Layer Posts with hashtags are asynchronously sent to Kafka topics Each message contains: hashtag, timestamp, userid, postid Multiple Kafka partitions ensure scalability and fault tolerance Processing Layer Apache Flink processes streams in real-time Implements sliding window aggregation (1hr, 24hr, 7d windows) Calculates topic popularity using weighted metrics: Post count User engagement (likes, comments) Unique user"See full answer

Kshitij A. - "The question is bit vague (I guess deliberately) so I believe firstly we shall ask questions and resolve ambiguity. Some initial questions could be : 1) Is this one time activity or something that should be done on continuous basis. If continuous basis then at what frequency. 2) How much staleness is acceptable in SYSTEM Y data 3) Are there any limitation in SYSTEM Y and is it fair to assume that we would need some kind of transformation to bring data into SYSTEM Y schema. 4) What kind of vol"See full answer

Faraz A. - "Scoped out problem constraints - how much data to download, how many computers, and how much time, how you can be detected (decentralized load). Designed a web crawler."See full answer

gdecuri - "Load Balancer, Multiple API Servers, game Service, pub-sub system, HTTP Long Polling for status updates, write-through cache. No SQL DB to store user, game, and move information."See full answer

V V. - "Simple file system ( Hash Map , LSM trees), and consistent hashing. I failed to discuss about conflicts ( Versioning)"See full answer

Kurt K. - "Why skip defining the data model? Or did I just miss it?"See full answer

Rjj - "I tried solving this question and here is the recorded video for the entire solution - https://youtu.be/G_LIbTp58XA Feel free to comment here or on the video for further discussion."See full answer

Anonymous Capybara - "using a relational database isn't a good choice for this system! we need more availability here than consistency (CAP theorem)"See full answer

Vikash A. - "Functional Requirement Upload the file of any type POST v1/drive Upload the another version of file. POST v1/drive/{fileId} Delete the file. DELETE v1/drive/{fileId} Share the file. POST v1/drive/{fileId} Control the access level of the file. Provide the file accessibility following the directory structure. Non Functional Requirement Reliability: The file along with its versions uploaded should be"See full answer

Yag S. - "I studied Exponent's TinyURL system design video. My interviewer was asking many detailed questions on API design, schema, as well as data required to store. I found system design questions are bit high level instead of depth. I think should have detail design of API, schema and some additional flavors."See full answer

Yash G. - " import lombok.*; import lombok.extern.slf4j.Slf4j; import org.springframework.boot.CommandLineRunner; import org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication; import org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.SpringBootApplication; import org.springframework.stereotype.Component; import org.springframework.stereotype.Repository; import org.springframework.stereotype.Service; import java.util.*; import java.util.concurrent.ConcurrentHashMap; import java.util.concurrent.ConcurrentMap; import java."See full answer

Yash G. - "import lombok.*; import org.springframework.boot.CommandLineRunner; import org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication; import org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.SpringBootApplication; import org.springframework.stereotype.Component; import org.springframework.stereotype.Repository; import org.springframework.stereotype.Service; import java.time.LocalDateTime; import java.util.*; @SpringBootApplication public class LldPracticeApplication { public static void main(String[] args) t"See full answer