Design Calendar Event Conflict Handling
Company: Google
Role: Software Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Onsite
Design the event settings and conflict-handling system for a large-scale calendar product similar to Google Calendar.
Users should be able to create, update, and delete calendar events. Events may include attendees, start and end times, time zones, recurrence rules, reminders, visibility settings, locations, and video meeting links.
Focus especially on how the system detects and handles user event conflicts when a user creates or updates an event.
Quick Answer: This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design scalable calendar event management and conflict-detection systems, covering distributed systems principles, temporal data modeling for time zones and recurrence, concurrency control, and notification/visibility semantics.