System Design Interview Questions
Practice 968 real System Design interview questions for 2026 — System Design interview questions drawn from actual interviews with detailed solutions to power focused interview preparation. Coverage spans big tech patterns and company-specific flavors from Meta, Amazon, OpenAI, DoorDash, and Google, emphasizing software-engineering fundamentals: high-level architecture, APIs, data models, scaling strategies, and component-level tradeoffs you’ll need to codify on a whiteboard or virtual diagram tool. What’s distinctive in 2026: interviewers evaluate your ability to reason about capacity, latency, consistency, fault tolerance, and operational ownership while making measurable tradeoffs; expect more questions about AI/LLM inference pipelines, vector search and feature stores alongside classic problems like caching, sharding, messaging, and geo-distribution. Prepare by practicing clear HLD-to-LLD transitions, writing concise API contracts, doing back-of-envelope capacity math, and running timed mock interviews that force diagram clarity and follow-up handling. Focus on metrics, failure modes, and deployment/monitoring choices — those separate good answers from great ones.

"I got asked a hardcore MCM DP question and I saw it on PracHub as well. Solved that question in 5 minutes. Without PracHub I doubt I could solve it in 5 hours. Though somehow didn't get hired, perhaps I guess I solved it too fast? /s"

"Believe me i'm a student here jn US. Recently interviewed for MSFT. They asked me exact question from PracHub. I saw it the night before and ignored it cause why waste time on random sites. I legit wanna go back and redo this whole thing if I had chance. Not saying will work for everyone but there is certainly some merit to that website. And i'm gonna use it in future prep from now on like lc tagged"

"10 years of experience but never worked at a top company. PracHub's senior-level questions helped me break into FAANG at 35. Age is just a number."

"I was skeptical about the 'real questions' claim, so I put it to the test. I searched for the exact question I got grilled on at my last Meta onsite... and it was right there. Word for word."

"Got a Google recruiter call on Monday, interview on Friday. Crammed PracHub for 4 days. Passed every round. This platform is a miracle worker."

"I've used LC, Glassdoor, and random Discords. Nothing comes close to the accuracy here. The questions are actually current — that's what got me. Felt like I had a cheat sheet during the interview."

"The solution quality is insane. It covers approach, edge cases, time complexity, follow-ups. Nothing else comes close."

"Legit the only resource you need. TC went from 180k -> 350k. Just memorize the top 50 for your target company and you're golden."

"PracHub Premium for one month cost me the price of two coffees a week. It landed me a $280K+ starting offer."

"Literally just signed a $600k offer. I only had 2 weeks to prep, so I focused entirely on the company-tagged lists here. If you're targeting L5+, don't overthink it."

"Coaches and bootcamp prep courses cost around $200-300 but PracHub Premium is actually less than a Netflix subscription. And it landed me a $178K offer."

"I honestly don't know how you guys gather so many real interview questions. It's almost scary. I walked into my Amazon loop and recognized 3 out of 4 problems from your database."

"Discovered PracHub 10 days before my interview. By day 5, I stopped being nervous. By interview day, I was actually excited to show what I knew."

"I recently cleared Uber interviews (strong hire in the design round) and all the questions were present in prachub."
"The search is what sold me. I typed in a really niche DP problem I got asked last year and it actually came up, full breakdown and everything. These guys are clearly updating it constantly."
Design a Scalable Job Scheduler
Design a job scheduler for a small startup, then explain how you would evolve it to support roughly 100x more scheduled tasks. The system should: - Al...
Design a listing connectivity ingestion service
Scenario You are designing a Connectivity Service that allows external service providers (partners) to create or update listings in your company’s pla...
Design trip booking REST API and schema
Design a RESTful API for a guest to book a trip. Include: - Core endpoints (search availability, create booking, view/cancel booking, payment/confirma...
Design an online ticket marketplace
Design a Ticketmaster-like system for discovering events and buying tickets. Your design should cover: - Functional requirements (e.g., browse/search ...
Implement compiler for custom language
Design and implement a simple compiler/interpreter Goal Design and implement a small compiler/interpreter for a bespoke toy language in your preferred...
Design a flexible expense reimbursement system
System Design: Expense Reimbursement with Pluggable Rules and Group Constraints Context Design an enterprise expense reimbursement platform where admi...
Design a job scheduler with SLA and logs
Scenario Design a distributed job scheduler that runs scheduled (time-based) jobs only (e.g., cron/interval). Each job execution has an SLA: if the ru...
Design a crossword puzzle solver system
Design a crossword puzzle solver Design a system that can solve a crossword puzzle. Inputs - A 2D board grid: - Some cells are blocked (black square...
Design a backend for an online checkers game
Design the backend system for an online, turn-based checkers game. Requirements Cover (at minimum): 1. Core gameplay - Create a new game and initia...
Design scalable insurance claims processing system
You are asked to design an insurance claims system for a health-focused insurance company. The system should support end-to-end claim handling, from s...
Design real-time driver heatmap system
System Design: Real-Time Driver Heatmap and Top-K Hottest Cells Context You are building a real-time driver heatmap for a ride-hailing platform that v...
Design a Slack-like messaging system
Design a Slack-like real-time team messaging system. Requirements: - Users can: - Create and join workspaces. - Create public and private channels...
Design a Merchant Ledger Service
Design a ledger service for a payments platform. The system must provide: - An API to record a transaction for a merchant. - An API to query the curre...
Design log-query stream processor
Stream Processor: Query Registration and Log Tagging Context You are designing a streaming component that ingests a single mixed stream of messages. E...
Design a high-level logging system
Design a high-level centralized logging system for a company. Assume many services (microservices, batch jobs) running across multiple hosts/container...
Design a hot-listing waitlist API
System Design: Waitlist API for High-Demand Listings Context You are designing a waitlist system for a marketplace that offers date-based inventory (e...
Design an in-memory database
System Design: In-Memory Database Engine (Single-Node Core, Scale-Out Aware) Context Design the core of an in-memory, single-node database engine inte...
Design Event Email System
Question Design an event system that can manage at least 1,000,000 concurrent events and send notification emails to every registered participant of e...
Design Distributed Cloud Job Scheduling
Design a distributed cloud job scheduling system. Users submit jobs that require resources such as CPU count, memory, GPU type, GPU count, region, and...
Design a ChatGPT-like serving system
Design a ChatGPT-like system for inference serving. Your design discussion should cover: 1. High-level architecture for chat completion (request routi...