Design an Instagram-like photo-sharing platform
Company: Meta
Role: Software Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: hard
Interview Round: Onsite
Design an Instagram-like photo and short-video sharing platform. Specify functional requirements (post, follow, like, comment, feed, notifications), non-functional goals (availability, latency, scalability, consistency), APIs, data model and storage choices, media handling and CDN strategy, feed generation/ranking pipeline, timeline consistency model, caching and search, sharding/partitioning and replication, background jobs (fan-out, media processing), rate limiting and abuse prevention, privacy/permissions, observability, disaster recovery, and cost/capacity estimates. Provide back-of-the-envelope calculations for expected QPS, storage, and bandwidth.
Quick Answer: This question evaluates system design competencies including distributed systems, scalability and capacity planning, data modeling and storage strategies, API design, media processing and CDN integration, consistency models, operational reliability, observability, and estimation.