Design a scalable interview question bank

Q: Design a scalable interview question bank

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.

Q: 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.

Q: What difficulty level is this interview question?

This is a hard difficulty System Design question, commonly asked during Technical Screen rounds at Palantir.

Q: What role is this question designed for?

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

Question

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.

Design a scalable interview question bank

Quick Overview

System Design: Scalable Interview Question Bank Platform

Context

Requirements

Solution

Comments (0)