Design a Game Leaderboard
Company: Meta
Role: Software Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Technical Screen
Design a leaderboard system for an online game.
The system must support:
- Recording and updating player scores.
- Showing the global top 10 players by score.
- Showing the top 10 scores among a player's friends.
Discuss the functional requirements, API design, data model, storage choices, ranking strategy, caching, scalability, consistency trade-offs, and how to keep both global and friend leaderboards efficient at large scale.
Quick Answer: This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design scalable, real-time ranking systems and assesses competencies in distributed systems architecture, data modeling, API design, storage selection, caching, ranking strategies, and consistency trade-offs within the System Design domain.