Design a news aggregator system
Overview
This question evaluates system design and distributed-systems competencies—specifically scalable ingestion, data modeling, deduplication, ranking, and low-latency feed serving—and is categorized under System Design.
Rippling
Dec 5, 2025, 12:00 AM
Software Engineer
Technical Screen
System Design
7
0
System Design: News Aggregator
Design a news aggregator (similar to a “Top stories”/Google News style product) that ingests articles from many publishers and serves ranked feeds to users.
Core requirements
- Ingest articles from thousands of sources (RSS/Atom feeds, publisher APIs, webhooks).
- Normalize & store article content/metadata: title, body/snippet, author, publish time, canonical URL, source, topics/tags.
- De-duplicate near-identical stories across sources (same event reported by many outlets).
-
Rank & serve
:
- A homepage feed (global ranking).
- A topic feed (e.g., Sports, Tech).
- Optional: personalized feed based on user interests.
- Low latency reads for feed browsing; freshness matters (new stories appear quickly).
Non-functional requirements (assume typical consumer scale)
- High availability, multi-region read support.
- Handle spikes during breaking news.
- Reasonable content safety (basic spam/malicious source handling).
What to cover
- APIs (read and ingestion-facing).
- Data model and storage choices.
- Ingestion + processing pipeline (parsing, enrichment, dedup).
- Ranking approach (signals, batch vs real-time).
- Caching and feed generation strategy.
- Reliability, backfills, and monitoring.
You may state assumptions (traffic, QPS, data volume) as needed.