Design a scalable logging system
Company: Rippling
Role: Software Engineer
Category: System Design
Interview Round: Onsite
Design a centralized logging system for a large organization.
The system should:
- Collect logs from many applications/hosts (different languages/environments)
- Support near-real-time search and filtering (e.g., by service, host, time range, severity)
- Provide retention policies (e.g., 7 days hot, 90 days archived)
- Handle high write throughput and bursts
- Be reliable (no/limited data loss) and multi-tenant (different teams)
Discuss requirements, high-level architecture, data model/indexing, scaling, reliability, and trade-offs.
Quick Answer: This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design scalable, reliable logging and observability infrastructure, testing competencies in distributed systems, ingestion pipelines, indexing and data modeling, storage and retention policies, multi-tenancy, and performance/reliability trade-offs.