System Design Interview Questions

B. T. - "The interviewer was interested how the system design would be for files, directories, symbolic links. After proposing my idea, I was asked to print all files for a given path."See full answer

Bella R. - "Approach Clarify the question Define deaf --> unable to hear, but can communicate via sign language, lip read and use all other senses Define fire alarm --> for residential use, it notifies occupants of smoke and potential fires and alerts fire department to check in and/or come over Define constraints --> budgetary constraint, design should be user-friendly and convenient Define goals --> get folks out of harm's way quickly and notify fire department to c"See full answer

Ramendra S. - "Step 1: Clarifying the Problem Scope We will focus on designing the leaderboard for Dream11 with these assumptions: Registered teams: 100,000 users are actively participating and ranked. Real-time updates: Leaderboard updates frequently as players accumulate points based on live sports events. Multiple leagues: Each user can participate in different leagues, so we will need to maintain a separate leaderboard for each league. Query efficiency: Users frequently"See full answer

Scott S. - " To clarify on what we are trying to solve for and get the definition of a distributed scheduler straight . So A Distributed Scheduler refers to a system that can handle job scheduling and execution in a scalable and fault-tolerant manner by distributing the workload across multiple servers or nodes. we will make some assumptions with the design , as follows: we will assume 10,000 QPS for job submissions and should be able query for jobs status . Job execution should have minimal latency"See full answer

BriskD - "I watched a couple of videos like this, one of them by Exponent staff (I think). It was disappointing that the architecture diagram and the walkthrough was a general layered architecture that you can apply to any backend system. I was wondering if there are videos that can be considered a reference material to watch, learn and improve on the tech (sys design) skills, and not so much about the soft skills."See full answer

Rjj - "I tried solving this problem and here is the recorded video for the answer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1tOkeQjyI4 And here is the link to Excalidraw board - https://excalidraw.com/#json=uabNFHcZm5qNh8CInMvyh,Wn9Vf1ZhGdl_iBCQYFkYdw"See full answer

Simon O. - "Functional Requirement Ingest Book Reviews in real time User in the website needs specify title tho search books, return response is the list of reviews on the books. Non Functional Requirement: User get real-time book reviews> It nees to handle the search among 1 million of active users daily"See full answer

Anubhav S. - " At low level: I would use two stacks: one for forward history and other for backward history. i go to tryexponent.com => this url will be stored in backward history stack. i go to google => again this url will be stored in backward history stack. i press back => data from backward history will be popped and put in to forward history stack. I press forward => data from forward history stack will be popped and put in to backward history tab. Also, whenever i go to any url,"See full answer

Kartikeya N. - "C : Okay. So I would want to start with knowing what is the product for which we have to build a recommendation system. I : This is a photo sharing product. C : Okay. So is this something on the lines of Instagram? I : Yes C : Okay. And are we a new product co or we have some current product built already? I : You can assume yourself. C : Okay. Is there any demography or country we are targeting? I : No, this is a global product C : Okay. So, the biggest goal of any product recommendation system"See full answer

anush - "@Jacob, your videos are really good and helpful. I want to know about the tool, you use for explaining the design in the videos."See full answer

A B. - "Great explanation on each of the components and their use. During the interview would a PM candidate be expected to go in-depth for capacity estimation (e.g. storage estimation, bandwidth estimation etc.?)"See full answer

Ankit M. - "Clarifying questions: When we talk about a 'meditation app', are we mainly focusing on audio content? And are we thinking of this under a big brand or are we a fresh startup? Also, is our main target the US? And, are we designing mainly for individual use, or are we thinking about larger settings like schools? Interviewer: It's a startup. We're aiming for individual users, mainly in the US, and yes, an audio-based format. Summary till now: In today's digital age there's an increasi"See full answer

Anshika R. - "Functional Requirement User should be able to add review the food item/order User should be able to rate the food item delivered User should be able to Like/Dislike others reviews User should be able to see all reviews on a food item Users should be able to receive rewards based on criteria- (Quality of the reviews- Based on number of likes - Monthly cash card) OOS - Item is already ordered and exists in a separate system, User is authenticated. No Media Non Functional requireme"See full answer

Scott S. - "Designing a Price Drop Tracker system like CamelCamelCamel involves creating a platform that tracks price changes for products on various e-commerce websites and notifies users when prices drop. Here’s a detailed system design for such a service: Functional Requirements User Registration and Authentication\: Users can register and log in. Support for social media logins (e.g., Google, Facebook). Product Tracking\: Users can add products to their watchlist for"See full answer

dreamingincode - "In the API design, the interviewer is switching between RPC style (operation based endpoints) and REST style (resource oriented). Sticking to one convention and explaining why it is preferred over the other e.g. REST if the twitter domain maps nicely to resources e.g. /tweet or /follower or /user would help to create a more consistent and unified API. It would make it easier for clients to integrate with the API as well."See full answer

Chitapuram N. - "Since there is a need for the data to be accurate and consistent without any latency to allocate a spot, can't the data be synchronously synced to replicas after every write as the number of writes are not many per min, instead of read lock phenomena Let me know if i am on a wrong thought here."See full answer