Design real-time delivery tracking system
Company: Motive
Role: Software Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: hard
Interview Round: Onsite
Design a parcel delivery platform that provides real-time visibility into each courier’s route. Specify how mobile apps publish GPS updates, how the backend ingests and streams location data, how routes and ETAs are computed and displayed to customers and operations, and what APIs are exposed (e.g., GET /couriers/{id}/trace, GET /orders/{id}/eta). Address scale (tens of thousands of couriers), data storage for historical playback, privacy and access control, latency vs. consistency trade-offs, offline mode and battery constraints, map matching/geofencing, failure handling, and monitoring.
Quick Answer: This question evaluates competency in designing scalable real-time location-tracking systems, covering skills such as real-time data ingestion and streaming, route and ETA computation, API design, data storage for historical playback, privacy-aware access control, and operational monitoring.