Design a basic task management system
Overview
This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design a simple task management service, covering competencies in data modeling, API and class design, storage selection, concurrency and consistency control, ID generation strategies, performance considerations (indexing, pagination), and testing approaches.
Amazon
Sep 6, 2025, 12:00 AM
Software Engineer
Technical Screen
System Design
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Design a Simple Task Management Service
Requirements
Design a simple task management system that supports:
- Add a new task with a unique ID and description.
- Mark a task as completed by ID.
- Get all incomplete tasks.
- Get all completed tasks.
- Get a task by ID.
What to Deliver
- Data model (entities, fields, and indexes).
- Core APIs/classes (language-agnostic or your preferred language).
- Choose in-memory vs. persistent storage and justify.
- How you ensure thread safety and consistency.
- ID generation strategies (auto-increment, UUID, timestamp-based/Snowflake-like): trade-offs for ordering, collisions, and sharding.
- Performance considerations (time/space complexity, pagination, indexing).
- Brief testing strategy (functional, concurrency, and performance).
Assume this is a single service used by multiple threads/clients. You may make minimal assumptions explicit to keep the design coherent.
Solution
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