11 most-asked system design interview questions (+ answers)

System design interview guide

Below is a list of 59 confirmed system design interview questions that were asked at Google, Amazon, Facebook, or Microsoft.

We identified these questions by analyzing a dataset of over 300 Glassdoor interview reports that were posted by software engineers, engineering managers, and technical program managers.

And the first thing you'll want to know is which of these questions are the most common.

Let’s get started.

Click here to practice system design interviews 1-on-1 with an ex-FAANG interviewer

System design interview questions

The 11 questions below were the most common out of over 350 system design interview questions that we collected, and they're listed roughly in order of frequency below (note: we've just made minor edits to the phrasing).

  1. How would you design a social media app?
  2. How would you design X game?
  3. How would you design a parking lot?
  4. How would you design a URL-shortening service?
  5. How would you design a web cache?
  6. How would you design autocomplete for a search engine?
  7. How would you design an API?
  8. How would you design a messaging app?
  9. How would you design an online file-sharing system
  10. How would you design an e-commerce store
  11. How would you design a ride-hailing / delivery app

Let's dig into these:

1. How would you design a social media app?

For this question you'll typically be asked to design a specific app, such as Twitter, Instagram, etc. For this example, we’ll assume the interviewer asked you to design Twitter. Here are some considerations for answering this question: 

Ask clarifying questions

  • Is the interviewer looking for a design of the core features, or a high-level overview of the whole service?
  • What are the constraints of the system?
  • What are your assumptions? (traffic distribution, number of active users and tweets, read vs write-heavy)

Design high-level

  • Back-of-the-envelope calculations: average KBs per tweet, size of new tweet content per month, read requests and tweets per second, etc.
  • High-level components: write, read, and search APIs; types of databases; SQL vs NoSQL; etc

Drill down on your design

  • Potential bottlenecks: adding a load balancer with multiple web servers, scalability issues, fanout service slowing down tweets and @replies, etc.
  • Components that you could dive into: how a user views the home timeline or posts a tweet, the intricacies of the database design, etc.

Bring it all together

  • Consider: does the final design address the bottlenecks you’ve identified? Does it meet the goals you discussed at the beginning of the interview? Do you have any questions for the interviewer?

For a full answer to this question, take a look at the video guide below from Success In Tech or this text guide from donnemartin on GitHub. 

 

2. How would you design X game?

Another topic that comes up frequently is designing a classic game. The exact game you’ll be asked about varies, but here are some of the most common ones we’ve seen:

  • Tic-tac-toe
  • Chess
  • Boggle
  • Minesweeper
  • Cards/poker

Let’s walk through an example of how you could approach the problem if you were asked to design a chess game. 

Ask clarifying questions

  • What are the rules of the game? 
  • How many players are there? Are there spectators?
  • Do we need a timer? Are any other special functions required?

Design high-level

  • Possible classes for the game:  board, piece, spot, etc.
  • Methods that will be required for things like moving pieces

Drill down on your design

  • Identify important attributes for each class, such as the grid coordinates and color of each spot
  • Define how the game will prevent illegal moves and recognize a victory

Bring it all together

  • Sense check your design, and confirm whether it has met all of the requirements you identified at the beginning of the interview

Some of the above considerations were inspired by this in-depth solution to the question, so feel free to check out that resource.

3. How would you design a parking lot?

For questions like these, interviewers are testing your skills in object-oriented design, to see whether you can apply technical thinking to physical objects. 

Ask clarifying questions

  • Is this a multiple floor parking garage or a single level parking lot?
  • How many entry and exit points will be needed, and for what types of vehicles?
  • Are there monetary goals for this parking lot?

Design high-level

  • Possible use cases: customers parking and paying for their spot, admin managing the system, parking attendants maintaining the lot and helping customers, etc.
  • Possible classes of the system: ParkingLot, ParkingFloor, Account, ParkingTicket, Vehicle, etc.

Drill down on your design

  • How will you diagram specific activities? (e.g. customers paying for parking tickets, display panels showing available spots, etc.)
  • What are the required enums, data types, and constants of the eventual code for the parking lot system?

Bring it all together

  • Will this system meet the requirements you’ve laid out with the interviewer in the beginning of the session?

For a full answer to this question, take a look at this text guide from Educative.io. You may also find this video walk-through from Think Software useful: 

 

4. How would you design a URL-shortening service?

URL shortening services like TinyURL, Bitly, etc. provide short link aliases that redirect to longer URLs. Here are some points of consideration to help you work out how to build this kind of system. 

Ask clarifying questions

  • Will users be able to customize the URL?
  • How long do the URLs last before they expire?
  • What are the availability and latency requirements for this system?

Design high-level

  • Back-of-the-envelope calculations: estimate the traffic and storage needs per month, as well as bandwidth and memory requirements
  • Define the APIs (SOAP, REST, etc) as well as a general database schema (URL mappings and user data)

Drill down on your design

  • Consider tradeoffs: encoding actual URLs may turn out the same shortened URL for two different users who enter the same URL. System may not work for URLs with URL-encoding. Concurrency may cause problems, etc.
  • Where will you place load balancers, and how will you cache URLs?

Bring it all together

  • Is the system you’ve designed highly available, so that URLs will not break if the servers go down? Does it meet any potential business objectives laid out at the start of the interview?

For a full answer to this question, take a look at this text guide from Educative.io.

Are you getting invited to enough system design interviews? If not, you might want to use our free tech resume guide (with examples) to improve your resume.

5. How would you design a web cache?

A distributed web cache is key to many systems, so that the RAM of multiple machines can be accessed in a single in-memory store quickly and reliably. Let’s look at some general points that should help you build out a design.

Ask clarifying questions

  • Consider the functional and non-functional requirements: put (storing objects under a unique key), get (retrieving objects), scalability, availability, performance, etc.
  • Specify your assumptions: can we assume that put and get are strings?

Design high-level

  • Possible data structures for storing data: hash table, queues, doubly linked list
  • Consider different options to distribute the cache, as well as the benefits of each (e.g. dedicated cache clusters vs co-located caches) 

Drill down on your design

  • Identify the tradeoffs of your choices: Maximum hash table size will prevent from adding more elements, shards may become “hot” (aka process more requests than others), etc.
  • Data replication could help with “hot” shard bottleneck

Bring it all together

  • Is the system you’ve designed fast, highly scalable, and available?

For a full answer to this question, take a look at the video guide below from System Design Interview.

 

6. How would you design autocomplete for a search engine?

If you’ve ever started typing something into a search engine, then you will have seen the suggested “autocomplete” options that are provided. This is also an interesting, and common, system design interview topic. Here are some points you could consider here:

Ask clarifying questions

  • What are the key features? (fast response time, high relevance, number of results, etc.)
  • What are the functional and non-functional requirements?

Design high-level

  • What data structure will you use to find suffixes and word completion, and how will you sort the solutions?
  • How will you store this data structure and connect it with the rest of the system? (Redis cache, database, hash table, API server, load balancer, etc.)

Drill down on your design

  • How would you modify the frequency of the system without compromising availability or increasing latency?
  • Consider the fault tolerance of the system - How would you store the already built trie data structure so that in case of failure the system can be restored?

Bring it all together

  • Is there any more optimization that you could do? Does the system meet the requirements laid out in the beginning of the interview?

For a full answer to this question, take a look at the video guide below from Narendra L.

 

7. How would you design an API?

APIs are kind of like the bridges that connect the roads of major software products. As a result, they are a central part of the system design of major apps like Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, etc.

Let’s say you were asked, very broadly, to design an API for a website. Here are some examples of how you could go about this:

Ask clarifying questions

  • Who/what will be using the API? 
  • What is the purpose of the API? 
  • What kind of information does the API need to pass? 

Design high-level

  • Define how the API will be accessed by users (e.g. through a mobile app, website, etc.)
  • Consider the provider side of the API and the services/databases that will be accessible

Drill down on your design

  • Should an API gateway be used to improve security?
  • Will there be an authentication process to access the API?
  • Will you use a REST API or something different? 

Bring it all together

  • Does your API meet all of the original requirements? Are there any additional considerations, or areas that could use further refinement?

To learn more about API design, check out this mock interview from Exponent, on designing the Twitter API:

 

8. How would you design a messaging app?

Real-time messaging apps are a common standalone product, or a built-in feature of larger systems. For this question, you might be asked to design a specific app, like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger. 

Ask clarifying questions

  • What is the scale and profile of the user base?
  • What features should be incorporated into the messenger? (e.g. text, video, audio, read receipts, message encryption, etc.)
  • Should we focus on monetizing the system?

Design high-level

  • How many servers will this system need, and how will clients connect to them?
  • How will the senders and receivers of messages connect to the servers and database?
  • Where will the messages be stored, and for how long?

Drill down on your design

  • How will you scale the system, and where are the bottlenecks?
  • Deep dive into a component: sent, delivered, read notifications; push notifications; media sharing; database design; etc.

Bring it all together

  • Have you met the initial goals you and the interviewer laid out for the system? 

To see another example of how to answer this question, watch this ex-Google engineering manager answer "Design Telegram":

 

9. How would you design a file-sharing system?

If you were interviewing at Google this question would probably be presented as "Design Google Drive" whereas elsewhere it might be "Design Dropbox."

You'll need to design a system that can  scale to millions of users and handle petabytes of data.

Ask clarifying questions

  • What is the expected user base and usage patterns? (e.g., individual users, businesses, file sizes, frequency of uploads/downloads)
  • Are there any specific security requirements for file storage and sharing?
  • Should the service support file versioning, collaboration, and synchronization across devices?

Design high-level

  • Determine the overall system architecture, including client-server communication and storage components.
  • Define how users will access the file-sharing service (web interface, desktop applications, mobile apps) and how they will authenticate and authorize access.
  • Determine the storage infrastructure and consider options such as cloud storage, distributed file systems, or a combination based on performance, scalability, and data redundancy requirements.

Drill down on your design

  • Define the data model and storage system for storing files and metadata. Consider techniques like sharding or partitioning to distribute and handle large amounts of data efficiently.
  • Discuss how the file upload and download process will work, including any optimizations for large file transfers, resumable uploads, and efficient streaming.
  • Address synchronization challenges, including conflict resolution, file locking, and ensuring consistency across devices when files are modified or shared.

Bring it all together

  • Discuss how the system can scale to handle a growing user base, increased file storage, and concurrent file operations.
  • Consider fault tolerance mechanisms, such as data replication and backup strategies, to ensure data durability and availability.
  • Discuss potential performance optimizations, like caching frequently accessed files or leveraging content delivery networks (CDNs) for faster data delivery.
  • For extra points, address security measures, including encryption at rest and in transit, access controls, and user permissions to protect sensitive data.

For a full answer to this question, take a look at the video guide below by Naren from Tech Dummies.

 

 10. How would you design an e-commerce store?

This question might take the form of "Design Amazon", "Design eBay", "Design FlipKart", etc.

Your online shopping system will need to store an inventory of products with lots of categories, allowing customers to search through them and make purchases. You'll also need to think about how you handle the expanding load on the website and prevent it from crashing on key retail days.

Ask clarifying questions

  • Will the store be available globally or limited to specific regions?
  • Do we need any specific features or functionalities desired, such as reviews, recommendations, or personalized experiences?

Design high-level

  • Determine the overall architecture of the e-commerce store, including client-server communication, databases, and external integrations.
  • Define the user interfaces, including web, mobile, and potentially other platforms like voice assistants or smart devices.
  • Identify the core features, such as product catalog, search, shopping cart, payment processing, and order management.

Drill down on your design

  • Discuss the product catalog and inventory management system, including categories, attributes, pricing, and availability.
  • Address the search functionality, including features like auto-suggestions, filters, and sorting options.
  • Discuss the shopping cart and checkout process, considering guest checkout, saved carts, and various payment options.
  • Time permitting, consider the order management system, including order tracking, notifications, and returns/refunds handling.
  • For extra points discuss security measures, including encryption, secure payment processing, and protection against common vulnerabilities like cross-site scripting (XSS) or SQL injection.

Bring it all together

  • How well does your system meet the requirements? Is there anything you can do to refine it?
  • You might want to address internationalization and localization requirements, including multiple languages, currencies, and regional regulations.

To see an expert answer to the question, watch the video below - Gaurav Sen is the candidate and he's always great.

 

If you'd prefer to take a look at a written solution to the problem, check out this article on Medium.

11. Design a ride-hailing or delivery app

This question frequently appears as "Design Uber", "Design DoorDash", etc., substituting in whichever brand is prominent in the region you're interviewing in.

Let's take a look at an answer outline to "Design Uber".

Ask clarifying questions

  • Are we just focusing on Uber's main ride-hailing service?
  • Are there any specific features or requirements, such as real-time tracking, payment options, or driver-partner management?
  • Any existing infrastructure or partnerships to leverage?

Design high-level

  • Determine the overall architecture of the system, including client applications, backend services, databases, and external integrations.
  • Identify the core features, such as ride requests, driver allocation, real-time tracking, payments, and ratings/reviews.

Drill down on your design

  • Discuss the rider app functionality, including authentication, ride requests, trip history, real-time driver tracking, and fare estimation.
  • Address the driver app functionality, including driver registration, authentication, trip acceptance, navigation, and earnings tracking.
  • Discuss the backend services responsible for matching riders with available drivers, considering factors like proximity, driver ratings, and estimated arrival time.
  • You could also address the real-time tracking system, including location updates, route optimization, and handling unexpected events like traffic or road closures.
  • Or you could discuss the payment processing system, including multiple payment options, fare calculations, and integration with payment gateways.
  • For extra points, consider security measures to protect user data, prevent fraud, and ensure secure communication.

Bring it all together

  • Has the system met the requirements laid out?
  • Discuss how the system can handle challenges such as surge pricing during peak demand and incentivize drivers to meet increased rider demand.
  • Or you could touch on address customer support features, such as in-app chat, support tickets, or phone support for issue resolution.
  • You might also want to mention potential integrations with external services, such as mapping/navigation providers, payment gateways, or carpooling solutions.
 

See a detailed written answer for "Design Uber back-end" in this Educative blog post.

More system design interview questions

Now that we’ve gone through the most common system design interview questions, let’s get into a longer list of questions that have been asked in real tech interviews, according to data from Glassdoor (note: we've edited to improve the phrasing of some questions).

The questions below are organized by company, to help you find the most relevant ones for your interviews.  

Google system design interview questions

Meta system design interview questions

  • How would you design Instagram / Facebook / Twitter?
  • Design a live commenting system for posts
  • Design WhatsApp / Facebook Messenger
  • Design Facebook status search
  • Design an online collaborative editing tool
  • How would you design an autocomplete service for a search engine?
  • Design a travel booking system for Facebook users
  • Design Instagram Stories
  • How would you build Minesweeper?
  • Design a system to prevent ads from foreign actors from interfering in domestic politics
  • Design a distributed botnet
  • Design a video upload and sharing app
  • Design the API layer for Facebook chat
  • How would you use a load balancer for memcache servers?
  • How would you architect the Facebook newsfeed?
  • Implement a typeahead feature

Amazon system design interview questions

  • How would you design Twitter / Instagram / Facebook?
  • Design Snake / Chess / Tic-Tac-Toe / Poker / Boggle
  • Design a parking lot
  • Design a phone billing system
  • Design a TinyURL service
  • Design an API that would take and organize order events from a web store
  • Design an elevator
  • Design a file system
  • Design a product recommendation system based on a user's purchase history
  • How would you design an electronic voting system?
  • Design a deck of cards
  • Design a system to optimally fill a truck
  • Design a warehouse system for Amazon
  • Design an online poker game
  • Design a parking payment system
  • Design a system to interview candidates
  • Design a search engine autocomplete
  • Design an airport
  • Design the Prime Video home page
  • Design a registration system for a restaurant
  • Design a food delivery app at a global scale
  • Design a Dropbox service
  • Design an inventory system
  • Design a news website
  • Design a shopping cart system
  • Design a system to find friends on social media
  • Design a Swiggy delivery system with a focus on optimizing for the shortest route
  • Design a temperature identification system with geographically distributed sensors
  • Design a ticketing system
  • How would you design a system that reads book reviews from other sources and displays them on your online bookstore?
  • Design a promotion mechanism which could give 10% cash back on a particular credit card
  • How would you build software behind an Amazon pick up location with lockers?
  • Design a distributed cache system

Microsoft system design interview questions

  • How does buffer overflow work?
  • How would you design an online portal to sell products?
  • Design a new fitness wearable to measure heart rate
  • Design a shopping cart

How to prepare for system design interviews

As you can see from the complex questions above, there is a lot of ground to cover when it comes to system design interview preparation. So it’s best to take a systematic approach to make the most of your practice time.

Below, you’ll find three preparation steps with links to free resources. You can also refer to our system design interview prep guide and our list of 19 system design interview tips from ex-interviewers.

Otherwise, let's start with preparation step 1.

1. Learn the concepts

There is a base level of knowledge required to be able to speak intelligently about system design. You don't need to know EVERYTHING about sharding, load balancing, queues, etc. 

However, you will need to understand the high-level function of typical system components. You'll also want to know how these components relate to each other, and any relevant industry standards or major tradeoffs. 

To help you get the foundational knowledge you need, we've put together a series of 9 system design concept guides. Here's the full list:

  • Network protocols and proxies, which make it possible for any networked computers to talk to each other, no matter where they are or what hardware or software they’re running.
  • Databases, integral components of the world’s biggest technology systems.
  • Latency, throughput, and availability, three common metrics for measuring system performance.
  • Load balancing, the process of distributing tasks over a set of computing nodes to improve the performance and reliability of the system.
  • Leader election algorithms, which describe how a cluster of nodes without a leader can communicate with each other to choose exactly one of themselves to become the leader. 
  • Caching, a technique that stores copies of frequently used application data in a layer of smaller, faster memory in order to compute costs and to improve data retrieval times and throughput.
  • Sharding, the horizontal scaling of a database system that is accomplished by breaking the database up into smaller “shards,” which are separate database servers that all contain a subset of the overall dataset.
  • Polling, SSE, and WebSockets, techniques for streaming high volumes of data to or from a server.
  • Queues and pub-sub, mechanisms that allow a system to process messages asynchronously, avoiding bottlenecks and help the system to operate more efficiently.

We’d encourage you to begin by studying these topics, and once you understand the basics, you can begin practicing system design questions.

2. Work through system design interview questions

As you likely noticed in the common questions section, we recommend using a repeatable answer framework when answering system design interview questions. You can learn more about that framework here, but in the meantime, here is a summary:

Ask clarifying questions

First, spend about five minutes checking in with your interviewer about the functional and non-functional requirements of what you’re going to design. Ask about the system’s goals and how they will be measured. Be sure that you fully understand the question before moving forward.

Call out any assumptions you’re making that will influence your design approach. If applicable, ask about non-functional requirements such as availability, consistency, scalability, etc.

Design high-level

Start the high-level design by specifying one to two metrics (e.g. number of users added, products sold before vs after a feature launch, etc.). Then use these metrics to do some simple calculations in order to find the optimal usage pool of the system.

Once you’ve defined your metrics, map out only the most functional components of the system (e.g. front end, web server, database, etc.).

Finally, before getting into the more detailed aspects of your system, make some decisions on how you will design its database. Choose whether it will be a relational or a no-SQL database, as well as its metadata and table structure.

Drill down on your design

If you haven’t already, start mapping out the system on your whiteboard. Talk through your diagram so that your interviewer is able to follow along and ask questions when necessary.

Consider any bottlenecks that may arise when it comes to the system’s scalability, performance, or flexibility.

To finalize your design, play to your strengths by choosing a component you’re more familiar with and drilling down on it. If you’re not sure which component would be best to explore, ask your interviewer.

Bring it all together

Before wrapping up the round, take about five minutes to re-examine what you’ve designed. Does it meet the objectives you laid out with the interviewer at the beginning of the session? It is okay to change some components at this stage if you think it will improve the system, but you must explain to the interviewer what you are doing and why.

Apply this framework to practice questions like those we’ve included in this article. Use it on different types of questions in a variety of subjects, so that you learn how to adapt it to different situations and respond to unpredictable questions on the fly.

3. Practice with mock interviews

The first step is always to practice by yourself, as we touched on above. Once you’ve got the framework down, start interviewing yourself out loud as you practice. Play both the role of the interviewer and the candidate, asking and answering questions. This will help you develop your communication skills and your process for breaking down problems.

Practice with someone else

Once you've done some individual practice, we would also strongly recommend that you practice solving system design questions with someone else interviewing you.

A great place to start is to practice with friends or family if you can. This can help you get some preliminary feedback on your approach, which will be especially helpful if your partner is familiar with system design interviews. 

Practice with ex-interviewers

Finally, you should also try to practice system design mock interviews with expert ex-interviewers, as they’ll be able to give you much more accurate feedback than friends and peers.

If you know someone who has experience running interviews at Google, Meta or another big tech company, then that's fantastic. But for most of us, it's tough to find the right connections to make this happen. 

Here's the good news. We've already made the connections for you. We’ve created a coaching service where you can practice system design interviews 1-on-1 with ex-interviewers from leading tech companies. Learn more about how an interview coach can give you an advantage, or simply click here to start scheduling sessions today.

 

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