Design a natural-disaster notification system

Company: Expedia

Role: Software Engineer

Category: System Design

Difficulty: hard

Interview Round: Onsite

Quick Answer: This question evaluates system design competencies including large-scale geospatial data processing, spatial indexing, event-driven notification pipelines, API and data modeling, reliability, observability, and trade-off analysis for scalability, timeliness, and accuracy, and it is commonly asked to assess a candidate's ability to reason about real-world constraints when designing resilient, high-throughput user-facing services. The domain is system design and distributed systems with a strong emphasis on geospatial processing and data engineering, and the level of abstraction is primarily high-level architectural thinking balanced with practical implementation and operational considerations such as SLOs and idempotency.