Design a Performant Frontend News Feed

Quick Overview

Design a React news feed with rich text, mentions and hashtag hover cards, pagination, offline behavior, virtualization, and clear application/feed/feed-item component boundaries. Connect requirements and APIs to data modeling, consistency, scaling, failure recovery, observability, and the important design trade-offs.

Design a Performant Frontend News Feed

Company: Rippling

Role: Frontend Engineer

Category: System Design

Difficulty: medium

Interview Round: Onsite

# Design a Performant Frontend News Feed Design a React news feed with rich text, mentions and hashtag hover cards, pagination, offline behavior, virtualization, and clear application/feed/feed-item component boundaries. ### Constraints & Assumptions - Feed items have stable IDs and may update. - Long feeds must not render every item. ### Clarifying Questions to Ask - Cursor or offset pagination? - What offline actions are supported? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - Normalized data, cursors, safe rich text, hover data, caching, virtualization, and render control. ### Follow-up Questions - How is scroll position restored? - How are optimistic actions reconciled?

Quick Answer: Design a React news feed with rich text, mentions and hashtag hover cards, pagination, offline behavior, virtualization, and clear application/feed/feed-item component boundaries. Connect requirements and APIs to data modeling, consistency, scaling, failure recovery, observability, and the important design trade-offs.

|Home/System Design/Rippling
Rippling logo
Rippling
Jul 27, 2026, 12:00 AM
mediumFrontend EngineerOnsiteSystem Design
1
0

Design a Performant Frontend News Feed

Design a React news feed with rich text, mentions and hashtag hover cards, pagination, offline behavior, virtualization, and clear application/feed/feed-item component boundaries.

Constraints & Assumptions

  • Feed items have stable IDs and may update.
  • Long feeds must not render every item.

Clarifying Questions to Ask Guidance

  • Cursor or offset pagination?
  • What offline actions are supported?

What a Strong Answer Covers Guidance

  • Normalized data, cursors, safe rich text, hover data, caching, virtualization, and render control.

Follow-up Questions Guidance

  • How is scroll position restored?
  • How are optimistic actions reconciled?

Submit Your Answer to Earn 20XP

Sign in to leave a comment

Loading comments...