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System Design questions require understanding of core concepts and practice. PracHub provides solutions with explanations to help you master system design interviews.

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This is a medium difficulty System Design question, commonly asked during Onsite rounds at Salesforce.

What role is this question designed for?

This question is commonly asked for Machine Learning Engineer candidates at Salesforce during technical interviews.

Design a collaborative spreadsheet backend | Salesforce Interview Question

Design a collaborative spreadsheet backend

Last updated: Mar 29, 2026

Quick Overview

This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design backend architecture, data models, API shape, concurrency control, consistency models, and storage strategies for a web-based collaborative spreadsheet with autosave, versioning, snapshots, and permissions.

Salesforce

Jan 12, 2026, 12:00 AM

Machine Learning Engineer

Onsite

System Design

11 solved

Design a web-based spreadsheet service similar to Google Sheets, with emphasis on backend architecture and data models.

Focus areas:

Multiple users can view and edit the same spreadsheet concurrently.
The system must support large spreadsheets and efficient load and save behavior.
Users expect autosave, version history, and snapshot or backup support.
The design should cover API shape, storage choices, consistency model, concurrency control, and database tables or schemas.

Discuss how you would represent workbooks, sheets, cells, formulas, edit operations, snapshots, and permissions. Explain trade-offs between different storage and synchronization approaches.

Solution

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