Design a price drop tracking service
Company: Meta
Role: Software Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Onsite
Design a price tracking service like CamelCamelCamel.
Requirements:
- Users track products and receive alerts when price drops below a threshold.
- Periodically fetch current prices from sources (official APIs or scraping).
- Store price history and show charts.
- Scale to millions of tracked products.
Out of scope: complex anti-bot scraping details.
Quick Answer: This question evaluates system-design competencies such as scalable architecture, data modeling for time-series price history, external data ingestion and integration, alerting and monitoring, and trade-off reasoning for large-scale services.