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 medium difficulty System Design question, commonly asked during Onsite rounds at Oracle.

What role is this question designed for?

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

Design a rate limiter | Oracle Interview Question

Design a rate limiter

Last updated: Mar 29, 2026

Quick Overview

This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design scalable, correct distributed rate limiting mechanisms, testing competencies in distributed systems, concurrency control, API gateway behavior, observability, and configurability within the System Design domain.

Oracle

Jan 26, 2026, 12:00 AM

Software Engineer

Onsite

System Design

Design a rate limiting system for an API gateway.

Your design should address:

Rate limits such as "N requests per second/minute" per key (e.g., per user, per IP, per API token).
Correctness under concurrency and bursty traffic.
Operation in a distributed, multi-instance gateway.
What happens on limit exceed (HTTP status, headers, retry guidance).
Observability and configurability (different limits per endpoint/customer tier).

Solution

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