Design a game leaderboard service
Company: Reddit
Role: Software Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: easy
Interview Round: Onsite
Overview: This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design scalable, low-latency backend systems and distributed data architectures, covering competencies such as API and data model design, consistency and availability trade-offs, partitioning and caching strategies, multi-region deployment, and operational concerns like freshness and abuse mitigation. Commonly asked in the system design domain, it probes both conceptual understanding of architectural trade-offs and practical application of scaling, storage and consistency choices for real-time leaderboards across seasons and game modes.