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 Technical Screen rounds at Palantir.

What role is this question designed for?

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

Design a scalable interview question bank | Palantir Interview Question

Quick Overview

This question evaluates system design and software engineering competencies including scalable multi-tenant architecture, data modeling and immutable versioning, semantic and keyword search indexing, API and selection-flow design, caching and consistency trade-offs, monitoring/SLOs, security/permissions, and cost/operational considerations.

System Design: Scalable Interview Question Bank Platform

Context

Design a multi-tenant SaaS platform for organizations to create and manage an interview question bank used during live technical interviews. The system must support authoring, collaborative review, tagging, difficulty calibration, fast search/browse, strict versioning, and a menu-style selection flow used by interviewers in real time.

Assume a target scale such as:

5,000 organizations, 2 million total questions, 50 million versions, 500 million events (views/uses), 200k monthly active users (authors/interviewers), 20k peak RPS reads, 1k peak RPS writes.
P95 API latency targets: reads ≤150 ms, writes ≤300 ms, search ≤300 ms, selection flow ≤150 ms.

Requirements

Core features
- Authoring with rich text and attachments; collaborative editing and comments.
- Tagging (topics, skills, languages), difficulty calibration, and versioning (immutable versions, draft → review → publish workflow).
- Search and browse with filters/facets; semantic and keyword search; suggestions.
- Menu-style selection flow for live interviews (guided, filterable, and diverse question menus).
Technical specifications to provide
- High-level architecture and data/storage choices.
- API endpoints covering CRUD, versioning/publish, tagging, search, selection, calibration, analytics.
- Data models and indexing strategy (keyword + semantic; facets; incremental updates).
- Recommendation/ranking approach for the menu flow (scoring and diversification).
- Multi-region deployment and data replication strategy.
- Caching layers and invalidation.
- Consistency vs availability trade-offs by subsystem.
- Rate limits and quotas.
- Monitoring, alerting, and SLOs.
- Cost considerations and optimizations.
- Permissions/roles and abuse prevention (moderation, audit, anti-scraping, usage caps).
- Offline editing and sync/conflict resolution.

State assumptions where needed and justify design choices.

Quick Overview

Context

Assume a target scale such as:

5,000 organizations, 2 million total questions, 50 million versions, 500 million events (views/uses), 200k monthly active users (authors/interviewers), 20k peak RPS reads, 1k peak RPS writes.

P95 API latency targets: reads ≤150 ms, writes ≤300 ms, search ≤300 ms, selection flow ≤150 ms.

Requirements

Core features

Authoring with rich text and attachments; collaborative editing and comments.
Tagging (topics, skills, languages), difficulty calibration, and versioning (immutable versions, draft → review → publish workflow).
Search and browse with filters/facets; semantic and keyword search; suggestions.
Menu-style selection flow for live interviews (guided, filterable, and diverse question menus).

Technical specifications to provide

High-level architecture and data/storage choices.
API endpoints covering CRUD, versioning/publish, tagging, search, selection, calibration, analytics.
Data models and indexing strategy (keyword + semantic; facets; incremental updates).
Recommendation/ranking approach for the menu flow (scoring and diversification).
Multi-region deployment and data replication strategy.
Caching layers and invalidation.
Consistency vs availability trade-offs by subsystem.
Rate limits and quotas.
Monitoring, alerting, and SLOs.
Cost considerations and optimizations.
Permissions/roles and abuse prevention (moderation, audit, anti-scraping, usage caps).
Offline editing and sync/conflict resolution.

State assumptions where needed and justify design choices.

Design a scalable interview question bank

Quick Overview

System Design: Scalable Interview Question Bank Platform

Context

Requirements

Solution

Submit Your Answer

Design a scalable interview question bank

Quick Overview

System Design: Scalable Interview Question Bank Platform

Context

Requirements

Solution

Submit Your Answer