Design a real-time game leaderboard
Quick Overview
This question evaluates competency in designing low-latency, high-throughput real-time systems and leaderboards, covering distributed ranking, data modeling for top-N and neighbor queries, consistency trade-offs, regional partitioning, and basic validation for cheating.
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Feb 25, 2026, 12:00 AM
Software Engineer
Onsite
System Design
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Design a real-time leaderboard for an online game.
Requirements:
- Players submit score updates frequently.
- Query top N players globally and per region.
- Query a player’s current rank and nearby neighbors.
- Updates and reads must be low latency.
- Handle cheating/basic validation.
Out of scope: advanced anti-cheat/ML.
Solution
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