Design an Instagram-like platform
Company: Meta
Role: Backend Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Onsite
Design a large-scale social media platform similar to Instagram.
Users should be able to:
- create accounts and follow other users
- upload photos or short videos with captions
- view a home feed of posts from accounts they follow
- like and comment on posts
- open creator profile pages
Discuss:
- core APIs and data model
- end-to-end workflow for posting media and serving feeds
- media storage, processing, and CDN delivery
- feed generation strategy and ranking
- scaling for heavy read traffic and users with very large follower counts
- caching, pagination, consistency, reliability, and observability
After presenting the overall design, choose one deep dive and explain it thoroughly, such as the feed fan-out pipeline or the media upload and processing pipeline.
Quick Answer: This question evaluates proficiency in scalable backend architecture, distributed systems, data modeling, media storage and processing, API design, feed generation and ranking, caching, consistency, and observability for high-throughput social platforms.