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Design an At-Most-Once Job Scheduler

Last updated: Apr 2, 2026

Quick Overview

This question evaluates a candidate's competency in distributed systems and system design, focusing on at-most-once execution semantics, fault tolerance, idempotency, scheduling and retry policies, and reliable notification delivery.

  • medium
  • Robinhood
  • System Design
  • Software Engineer

Design an At-Most-Once Job Scheduler

Company: Robinhood

Role: Software Engineer

Category: System Design

Difficulty: medium

Interview Round: Onsite

Design a distributed job scheduler that supports both one-time and recurring jobs. Requirements: - Clients can create jobs with a schedule, payload, retry policy, and notification target. - Each scheduled run should be owned by at most one worker at a time. - Duplicate successful execution of the same scheduled run should be avoided. - The system should support retries for transient failures. - For recurring jobs, a failed run must still generate a failure notification for that specific occurrence. - If a scheduler, worker, or notification component crashes, the system should recover without silently losing jobs or notifications. Discuss the API, storage model, scheduling logic, worker coordination, retries, notification delivery, and how you would handle component failures and recovery.

Quick Answer: This question evaluates a candidate's competency in distributed systems and system design, focusing on at-most-once execution semantics, fault tolerance, idempotency, scheduling and retry policies, and reliable notification delivery.

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Robinhood logo
Robinhood
Jan 14, 2026, 12:00 AM
Software Engineer
Onsite
System Design
7
0
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Design a distributed job scheduler that supports both one-time and recurring jobs.

Requirements:

  • Clients can create jobs with a schedule, payload, retry policy, and notification target.
  • Each scheduled run should be owned by at most one worker at a time.
  • Duplicate successful execution of the same scheduled run should be avoided.
  • The system should support retries for transient failures.
  • For recurring jobs, a failed run must still generate a failure notification for that specific occurrence.
  • If a scheduler, worker, or notification component crashes, the system should recover without silently losing jobs or notifications.

Discuss the API, storage model, scheduling logic, worker coordination, retries, notification delivery, and how you would handle component failures and recovery.

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