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 medium difficulty System Design question, commonly asked during Technical Screen rounds at Hackerrank.

What role is this question designed for?

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

Design a URL Shortener | Hackerrank Interview Question

Design a URL Shortener

Last updated: Apr 6, 2026

Quick Overview

This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design scalable, highly available distributed systems, covering competencies in API design, data modeling, storage and caching strategies, unique code generation, and operational concerns such as expiration, abuse mitigation, and analytics.

Hackerrank

Mar 18, 2026, 12:00 AM

Software Engineer

Technical Screen

System Design

Design a URL shortening service similar to Bitly.

The system should support:

Creating a short URL for a given long URL
Redirecting a short URL to the original long URL
Optional expiration time for links
Very fast redirects and high availability

Discuss the following:

Functional and non-functional requirements
Public APIs
Data model
How to generate unique short codes
Read and write paths
Storage and caching choices
How to scale to very high read traffic
Handling hot links, abuse, expiration, and basic analytics

Solution

Show

Comments (0)

Loading comments...

Browse More Questions

More System Design•More Hackerrank•More Software Engineer•Hackerrank Software Engineer•Hackerrank System Design•Software Engineer System Design