Design a game leaderboard service

Q: Design a game leaderboard service

This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design scalable, low-latency ranking services, testing competencies in distributed systems, data modeling, API design, and consistency and performance trade-offs in the System Design domain.

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Question

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Design a game scoring leaderboard system.

Core requirements

Players can submit/update their score.
A player can view:
1. Their own score and rank .
2. Friends leaderboard : ranks/scores among their friends.
3. Global leaderboard : ranks/scores among all players.
Support showing:
- Top 10 friends (and include the user if needed).
- Top 10 global .
- “Around me” : e.g., show the user and ~10 entries above/below them.
The leaderboard UI can scroll/paginate through global rankings.

Clarifications to cover

Define tie-breaking (same score).
Latency/throughput targets (assume large scale).
Consistency expectations (how fresh must ranks be?).

Provide:

API design
Data model
High-level architecture
Storage/algorithm choices for ranking and scrolling
Scaling, caching, and failure/edge cases

Design a game leaderboard service

Core requirements

Clarifications to cover

Solution

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Design a game leaderboard service

Overview

Core requirements

Clarifications to cover

Solution

Comments (0)