Design a Google News-like aggregator
Company: Rippling
Role: Software Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: hard
Interview Round: Onsite
Design a news aggregation system similar to Google News. Emphasize the ingestion layer: publisher onboarding/authentication, RSS/sitemap/crawl scheduling, politeness and rate limiting, fetcher architecture, schema normalization and enrichment (language detection, category tagging), deduplication and near-duplicate clustering, near-real-time updates and backfill, idempotency and exactly-once semantics, retry strategies, spam/abuse filtering, copyright and robots compliance, and monitoring/alerting. Then cover storage and retrieval: article store, indexing, feed generation, personalization/ranking, freshness and caching. Specify APIs, data models, consistency guarantees, multi-region scalability/partitioning, SLAs, and provide capacity estimates.
Quick Answer: This question evaluates system design skills for building a large-scale, multi-region news aggregation platform, assessing competencies in ingestion architecture, deduplication and clustering, indexing and retrieval, personalization and ranking, and operational concerns like monitoring, consistency, and compliance.