Design a personalized news aggregator
Company: Rippling
Role: Software Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Onsite
Design a Google News-style news aggregator.
The system collects articles from third-party publisher APIs, primarily by polling. Users can browse current news, follow specific publishers, and select preferred content categories. Personalization should only use these explicit signals: followed publishers and user-selected categories.
Discuss:
- Product requirements and non-functional requirements.
- External publisher ingestion and polling strategy.
- Core APIs for clients and publishers.
- Data model and storage choices.
- Feed generation, ranking, caching, and pagination.
- Deduplication of similar articles.
- Fault tolerance, freshness, rate limiting, and monitoring.
Quick Answer: This question evaluates skills in designing scalable content ingestion pipelines, API and data architecture, explicit-signal personalization, ranking and caching strategies, deduplication, and operational concerns such as fault tolerance, rate limiting, freshness, and monitoring.