Design an Instagram-Style Social Feed
Company: Meta
Role: Software Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Onsite
Design an Instagram-style social media system.
Functional requirements:
- Users can create posts containing media and captions.
- Users can follow other users.
- Users can view a home feed of posts from accounts they follow.
- Users can like and comment on posts.
- Users can view profile pages and post detail pages.
Non-functional requirements:
- The feed should load with low latency.
- The system should be highly available and scalable.
- Media delivery should be efficient.
- The design should handle sudden traffic spikes caused by celebrity accounts, viral posts, or very popular comments.
Discuss APIs, data models, storage choices, feed generation, caching, asynchronous processing, rate limiting, and strategies for hot accounts or hot posts.
Quick Answer: This question evaluates competency in designing scalable, highly available visual-media social feed systems, covering API design, data models, storage choices, feed generation, caching, asynchronous processing, rate limiting, efficient media delivery, and strategies for mitigating hot accounts or viral posts.