Design a URL Shortener: Code Generation, Fast Redirects, and Scaling
Company: Vercel
Role: Software Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: easy
Interview Round: Onsite
Overview: Design a URL shortening service that creates short links and redirects visitors to the original URLs. It tests capacity estimation, unique short-code generation under concurrency, data modeling for a read-heavy workload, a fast cached redirect path, redirect status choices, analytics, and scaling and failure handling.