Design a live-stream comments system

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Quick Overview

This question evaluates design skills for scalable, low-latency real-time comment systems, covering architecture, data modeling, APIs, ingestion and fanout strategies, streaming/messaging trade-offs, and operational concerns such as rate limiting, backpressure, and failure handling.

Design a live-stream comments system

Company: Microsoft

Role: Software Engineer

Category: System Design

Difficulty: hard

Interview Round: Technical Screen

Overview: This question evaluates design skills for scalable, low-latency real-time comment systems, covering architecture, data modeling, APIs, ingestion and fanout strategies, streaming/messaging trade-offs, and operational concerns such as rate limiting, backpressure, and failure handling.

Read the full Microsoft Software Engineer interview experience this question came from

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Microsoft
Jan 22, 2026
hardSoftware EngineerTechnical ScreenSystem Design
9
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