Design a TikTok-like short video platform
Quick Overview
This question evaluates skills in large-scale system design for short-video platforms, including video ingestion and transcoding, storage and CDN strategies, playback latency, personalized feed and recommendation pipelines, data modeling, scalability, consistency trade-offs, and observability/abuse mitigation.
Salesforce
Mar 1, 2026, 12:00 AM
Software Engineer
Technical Screen
System Design
15
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Design a TikTok-like short-video product.
Core user stories
- Users upload short videos (e.g., 10–60 seconds).
- Users watch an infinite For You feed (personalized recommendations).
- Users can like, comment, follow creators, share.
Requirements
Functional
- Video upload, processing (transcode), storage, playback.
- Feed generation: personalized ranked list of videos.
- Engagement actions: like, comment, follow.
Non-functional
- Low startup latency for playback; smooth scrolling.
- High availability and horizontal scalability.
- Reasonable consistency (define where strong vs eventual is needed).
- Observability and abuse mitigation (spam, reuploads, bot likes).
Deliverables
- High-level architecture and key services.
- Data model / storage choices.
- Feed + recommendation pipeline (online + offline).
- Caching/CDN strategy.
- Handling hot videos/creators and traffic spikes.
- APIs (sketch) and key metrics to monitor.
Solution
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