Design ad click aggregator and file sync service
Company: Apple
Role: Software Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Onsite
Quick Answer: This question evaluates system design competencies in building scalable, reliable distributed services—covering high-throughput event ingestion and aggregation, real-time analytics, idempotency and out-of-order handling for ad click processing, and cloud file storage, synchronization, versioning and secure sharing for a Dropbox-like service, and it falls under the System Design domain. It is commonly asked to assess architectural thinking about APIs, data models, major components, scaling strategies and operational trade-offs, and focuses primarily on conceptual architectural understanding with practical application constraints like latency, consistency, throughput, storage efficiency and security.