How do I approach System Design interview questions?

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

What difficulty level is this interview question?

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

What role is this question designed for?

This question is commonly asked for Software Engineer candidates at Meta during technical interviews.

Design a game leaderboard service | Meta Interview Question

Design a game leaderboard service

Last updated: Mar 29, 2026

Quick Overview

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.

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

Solution

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