Meta System Design Interview Questions

Meta System Design interview questions at Meta focus on building large-scale, reliable, and maintainable services. What’s distinctive is the emphasis on trade-offs that matter at billions-of-requests scale: clear product metrics, data modeling, API contracts, caching and storage choices, consistency vs. availability, operational tooling, and how ML components fit into the pipeline. Interviewers evaluate how you clarify requirements, set measurable success criteria, prioritize constraints, and communicate end-to-end architecture decisions under time pressure. ([designgurus.io](https://www.designgurus.io/blog/meta-system-design-interview-questions?utm_source=openai)) Expect an open-ended discussion where clarifying questions and a simple sketch come first, followed by deeper exploration of components, data flow, scaling strategies, failure modes, and monitoring. For interview preparation, practice a repeatable framework: clarify goals, define APIs and data models, select storage and caching, reason about bottlenecks and trade-offs, and describe operational plans. Time-box mock designs and rehearse explaining trade-offs to non-specialists; showing clear, measurable decisions and awareness of real-world constraints is what distinguishes strong candidates. ([systemdesignhandbook.com](https://www.systemdesignhandbook.com/guides/meta-ml-system-design-interview/?utm_source=openai))