System Design Interview Questions

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

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

Linying W. - "Very helpful! But I have a question: the location of drivers can be changing every minute, so won't reading from location cache returning stale data?"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

M D. - "Understand the business problem: Identify the business problem that the AI data product is intended to solve. Identify the target audience: Understand who will be using the data and what problem they will be solving for using the data. This will inform the features and functionality that should be included in the product. Gather and preprocess the data: Collect and preprocess the data that is relevant to the problem that it is being solved for. This will inform the AI algorithm"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

Krishnan S. - "Excellent job Roshan, really liked the explanation. Which software were you using to explain the system design diagrams?"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

Anup S. - "Inventory Service and Registration service can they be in SYNC always ?? The "experience layer" needs accessed by Hotel owners also ??? How does real time inventory come from all Hotels ???"See full answer

Chetan R. - "Is this in-memory key value store or Disk based as store they are trying to make? Can someone help me with this"See full answer

Praveen - "I will start with discussing the Google mission statement, which is to organize the world's information and make it easily accessible to everyone to help them get things done, and make their day a bit easier. I will think about building something that will leapfrog this mission. Google has already organized all of the world's public digital information in the current state. There are opportunities to get more information into a digital form. But there are also significant improvements in mak"See full answer

Scott S. - " Functional Requirements Content Ingestion\: Ingest news articles from various sources (websites, social media, etc.). Handle different types of content (text, images, videos). Content Analysis\: Extract and preprocess text from articles. Analyze the content for potential indicators of fake news. Model Training and Prediction\: Use machine learning models to classify content as fake or real. Continuously improve models with new data and f"See full answer

Srinivasa R. - "Any more details about this can make it easy"See full answer

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

Aswath B. - "basic drew the diagram"See full answer

Farhan I. - "What software is being used to draw the design?"See full answer

Personal W. - "Payment system requirement assumption: Need to be ACID Amount limitation - some validation for max input size can be done at client level/ API level. Need to store historic info - GDPR The information to be stored for database assumed can be structured so RDBMS like mysql or Postgres Notification requirement - if fail or success need to be text or email to user and or caller Scalable - Assumption that it deals with critical transaction so Availability and Scalability requirement i"See full answer