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Design a Scalable Job Scheduler

Last updated: May 19, 2026

Quick Overview

This question evaluates system design and distributed systems competencies, focusing on scheduling semantics, fault tolerance, idempotency, API and data modeling, horizontal scalability, and operational observability for large-scale job execution.

  • Airbnb
  • System Design
  • Software Engineer

Design a Scalable Job Scheduler

Company: Airbnb

Role: Software Engineer

Category: System Design

Interview Round: Onsite

Design an internal job scheduling platform for a large company. The platform should allow internal services and engineers to submit jobs that run at a specified time or on a recurring schedule. The system should scale to roughly 10 million scheduled jobs, execute jobs reliably, and expose operational visibility to users and on-call engineers. Address the following: - Functional requirements: create, update, cancel, and inspect jobs; support one-time and recurring jobs; dispatch ready jobs to workers; retry failed jobs. - Non-functional requirements: high availability, horizontal scalability, low scheduling latency, durability, idempotency, and observability. - API design, data model, scheduler architecture, worker/executor design, failure handling, and monitoring. - Explain how the system avoids double execution while still recovering from crashes.

Quick Answer: This question evaluates system design and distributed systems competencies, focusing on scheduling semantics, fault tolerance, idempotency, API and data modeling, horizontal scalability, and operational observability for large-scale job execution.

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Airbnb logo
Airbnb
Apr 8, 2026, 12:00 AM
Software Engineer
Onsite
System Design
1
0

Design an internal job scheduling platform for a large company.

The platform should allow internal services and engineers to submit jobs that run at a specified time or on a recurring schedule. The system should scale to roughly 10 million scheduled jobs, execute jobs reliably, and expose operational visibility to users and on-call engineers.

Address the following:

  • Functional requirements: create, update, cancel, and inspect jobs; support one-time and recurring jobs; dispatch ready jobs to workers; retry failed jobs.
  • Non-functional requirements: high availability, horizontal scalability, low scheduling latency, durability, idempotency, and observability.
  • API design, data model, scheduler architecture, worker/executor design, failure handling, and monitoring.
  • Explain how the system avoids double execution while still recovering from crashes.

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