Design a nearby places (proximity) service
Company: Meta
Role: Software Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Onsite
Design a proximity search service like Yelp/Google Maps.
Requirements:
- Store places with (place_id, name, lat/lng, category, rating).
- Query: “find places within radius R of a location”, with filters and sorting.
- Support high QPS reads and moderate writes (place updates).
- Results should be reasonably fresh.
Out of scope: route planning, full-text reviews.
Quick Answer: This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design a scalable, low-latency geospatial search service, testing competencies in geospatial indexing, data modeling, query filtering and sorting, consistency and freshness trade-offs, and handling high QPS with moderate writes.