Design a real-time game leaderboard
Company: Meta
Role: Software Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Onsite
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.
Quick Answer: 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.