This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design a scalable, read-heavy social media backend encompassing media ingestion and storage, personalized feed generation, data modeling, sharding, consistency vs availability trade-offs, observability, and cost/DR planning, testing competencies in distributed systems, performance engineering, and operational design. Commonly asked in system design interviews to assess architectural reasoning and trade-off analysis, it is categorized under System Design and requires both high-level conceptual thinking and practical application details such as APIs, data models, capacity estimates, and component-level considerations.

Design a photo/video sharing platform with core social features and a personalized feed. Optimize for large-scale read-heavy workloads and mobile clients. Optional features (stories, DMs) may be stubbed but need not be fully designed.
Login required