Design an RSS News Feed Service
Company: Confluent
Role: Software Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Onsite
Design an RSS news feed service.
The service should allow users to subscribe to RSS sources, ingest articles from those sources, store article metadata, and serve each user a personalized feed. Focus especially on database table design and API design. You do not need to draw diagrams, but you should clearly explain the main components, storage model, and request flows.
Quick Answer: This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design scalable backend systems, model and store content metadata, define APIs for subscriptions and feed retrieval, and reason about personalization and ingestion pipelines.