Design an RBAC Relational Schema

Company: Bytedance

Role: Software Engineer

Category: System Design

Difficulty: medium

Interview Round: Technical Screen

Quick Answer: This question evaluates relational schema design and access-control modeling skills by testing understanding of RBAC concepts (users, roles, permissions, resources), entity-relationship cardinality, foreign keys, and authorization query patterns within the System Design domain, and it spans both conceptual modeling and practical application to schema, keys, indexes, and query performance. It is commonly asked to measure an interviewee's ability to translate access-control requirements into normalized tables, reason about one-to-many versus many-to-many links and scoped grants, and to design efficient runtime authorization checks and production constraints.