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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 hard difficulty System Design question, commonly asked during Onsite rounds at Uber.

What role is this question designed for?

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

Design a meeting scheduler with cancellations

Quick Overview

This System Design question evaluates expertise in designing distributed meeting scheduling systems, including data modeling, API design, recurrence and exception semantics, concurrency and consistency mechanisms, time zone and multi-tenant considerations, room/attendee constraints, and notification/deduplication workflows.

System Design: Meeting Scheduling Platform (Onsite)

Context

Design a multi-tenant meeting scheduling system for an organization of any size (from startups to very large enterprises) operating across time zones. The system must support single and recurring meetings, rooms with constraints (capacity, equipment, location), and prevent double-booking of both people and rooms.

Functional Requirements

Core APIs (HTTP/gRPC acceptable):
- Create, update, cancel single or recurring meetings.
- Prevent double-booking for attendees and rooms.
- Query free/busy and return the earliest common slot across N participants with room constraints and time zones.
Recurrence: iCal-style RRULEs, exceptions (single-instance edits), and partial-series updates/cancels.
Notifications: Invitations, updates, and cancellations.

Data and Scale Requirements

Specify data model (tables/collections and key fields).
Choose storage (SQL/NoSQL) per dataset, with justification.
Propose indexing and sharding for multi-tenant scale.

Concurrency and Consistency

Describe conflict detection and concurrency control during create/update/cancel, including:
- Optimistic locking, transactional boundaries, idempotency.
- Algorithms for overlap detection.

Cancellation Flow

Detail how to remove meetings efficiently, propagate notifications, free resources, and maintain audit history.
Propose optimizations for O(log n) cancel operations (per calendar) and bulk cancellations.

Nonfunctional Requirements

State reasonable QPS and latency SLOs, caching strategy, consistency model (strong vs eventual), background jobs, failure handling and retries, deduplication, security and access control.
Provide back-of-the-envelope capacity estimates.

Quick Overview

Context

Functional Requirements

Core APIs (HTTP/gRPC acceptable):

Create, update, cancel single or recurring meetings.
Prevent double-booking for attendees and rooms.
Query free/busy and return the earliest common slot across N participants with room constraints and time zones.

Recurrence: iCal-style RRULEs, exceptions (single-instance edits), and partial-series updates/cancels.

Notifications: Invitations, updates, and cancellations.

Design a meeting scheduler with cancellations

Quick Overview

System Design: Meeting Scheduling Platform (Onsite)

Context

Functional Requirements

Data and Scale Requirements

Concurrency and Consistency

Cancellation Flow

Nonfunctional Requirements

Solution

Comments (0)

Design a meeting scheduler with cancellations

Quick Overview

System Design: Meeting Scheduling Platform (Onsite)

Context

Functional Requirements

Data and Scale Requirements

Concurrency and Consistency

Cancellation Flow

Nonfunctional Requirements

Solution

Comments (0)