Design an Event Booking System
Company: Microsoft
Role: Software Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Onsite
Design a high-level event booking system for concerts, movies, or sports events. The system should allow organizers to create events and publish seat inventory, and allow users to search for events, view availability, reserve seats, pay, and receive a booking confirmation.
Discuss:
- Functional and non-functional requirements
- External APIs
- Core services and data flow
- Database design
- Seat inventory modeling
- Concurrency control to prevent double booking
- Payment, cancellation, and refund flows
- Scaling, reliability, and observability
Quick Answer: This question evaluates system architecture, distributed systems, data modeling, concurrency control for seat inventory, transactional integrity for bookings and payments, and integration with external APIs and observability tools.