How do I approach System Design interview questions?

System Design questions require understanding of core concepts and practice. PracHub provides solutions with explanations to help you master system design interviews.

What difficulty level is this interview question?

This is a hard difficulty System Design question, commonly asked during Onsite rounds at Remitly.

What role is this question designed for?

This question is commonly asked for Software Engineer candidates at Remitly during technical interviews.

Design a Production-Ready URL Shortener | Remitly Interview Question

Quick Overview

This question evaluates competency in designing a scalable, reliable, and secure production URL shortening service, covering API design, link data modeling and analytics, ID/token generation, caching and read/write paths, partitioning/replication/consistency choices, rate limiting and abuse mitigation, TTL handling and cleanup, and HA/DR and monitoring. Commonly asked in system design interviews to probe architectural trade-offs for high-read consumer services, it belongs to the System Design domain and emphasizes practical application of distributed systems and operational concepts rather than only conceptual theory.

System Design: Production-Ready URL Shortening Service

Goal

Design a production-ready URL shortening service that can issue short links, resolve them at low latency, and provide management and analytics. The service must be scalable, reliable, and secure.

Requirements

Public APIs to:
1. Create short links (optionally with custom alias and expiration/TTL).
2. Resolve short links to their destination.
3. Manage short links (enable/disable, update destination, extend TTL, fetch stats).
Propose a database schema for links and analytics.
Propose an ID/token generation strategy with collision avoidance.
Describe read/write paths with caching.
Discuss partitioning, replication, and consistency choices.
Include rate limiting, abuse/spam mitigation.
Include analytics and click tracking.
Describe TTL handling and cleanup.
Strategies for high availability (HA), disaster recovery (DR), and monitoring.
Compare key trade-offs under different traffic patterns (read-heavy vs write-heavy, hot-spot links vs long-tail, single-region vs global).

Assume a consumer-facing scale with very high read QPS and moderate writes, and that links can be public or managed by authenticated users.

Quick Overview

Requirements

Public APIs to:

Create short links (optionally with custom alias and expiration/TTL).
Resolve short links to their destination.
Manage short links (enable/disable, update destination, extend TTL, fetch stats).

Propose a database schema for links and analytics.

Propose an ID/token generation strategy with collision avoidance.

Describe read/write paths with caching.

Discuss partitioning, replication, and consistency choices.

Include rate limiting, abuse/spam mitigation.

Include analytics and click tracking.

Describe TTL handling and cleanup.

Strategies for high availability (HA), disaster recovery (DR), and monitoring.

Compare key trade-offs under different traffic patterns (read-heavy vs write-heavy, hot-spot links vs long-tail, single-region vs global).

Assume a consumer-facing scale with very high read QPS and moderate writes, and that links can be public or managed by authenticated users.

Design a Production-Ready URL Shortener

Quick Overview

System Design: Production-Ready URL Shortening Service

Goal

Requirements

Solution

Submit Your Answer to Earn 20XP

Design a Production-Ready URL Shortener

Quick Overview

System Design: Production-Ready URL Shortening Service

Goal

Requirements

Solution

Submit Your Answer to Earn 20XP