Design an internal interest-matching platform
Overview
This question evaluates system design skills for building an internal interest-matching platform, including real-time scalable architecture, data modeling, API design, search and recommendation systems, messaging, and privacy/access controls.
Palantir
Jul 15, 2025, 12:00 AM
Software Engineer
Technical Screen
System Design
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System Design Prompt: Internal Employee Interest Matching Platform
Context
Design an internal-only platform that connects employees with similar interests to foster collaboration, mentorship, and community. Assume a typical enterprise environment with SSO, an HR directory, and tens of thousands of employees. The system should provide near real-time updates when interests change.
Requirements
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Features
- Profile creation and editing
- Interest tagging (free text with normalization and a suggested taxonomy)
- Discovery and search (by tags, location, team, etc.)
- Matching/recommendations (who should I connect with?)
- Messaging (1:1 and small group)
- Data model and storage choices
- APIs (profile, interests, discovery, recommendations, messaging)
- Matching and ranking approach (signals, algorithm)
- Privacy and access controls (internal-only visibility, role/attribute-based)
- Cold start strategy
- High-level architecture (services, databases/search indices, cache, event/queue)
- Scaling plan to tens of thousands of employees with near real-time updates
- Monitoring/metrics and abuse prevention
Solution
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