Design a Global Calendar Service
Company: LinkedIn
Role: Software Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Onsite
Design a calendar system for users in multiple time zones.
The system should support:
- creating, updating, deleting, and viewing calendar events
- one-time and recurring events
- querying a user's schedule for a time range
- scheduling events without losing correctness across time zones
- handling daylight saving time changes correctly
Discuss the API design, data model, recurrence representation, storage strategy, timezone handling, conflict detection, scaling approach, and consistency model. Pay special attention to how recurring events should behave when the organizer's local timezone observes daylight saving time.
Quick Answer: This question evaluates competence in designing scalable, time-zone aware calendaring systems, covering API and data model design, recurrence representation, daylight saving semantics, conflict detection, storage strategy, and consistency trade-offs.