Design Real-Time Search Autocomplete with Top-10 Popularity-Ranked Prefix Suggestions
Company: Pinterest
Role: Software Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: hard
Interview Round: Onsite
Overview: Design a search autocomplete service that returns the top 10 popularity-ranked suggestions for an exact prefix, with near real-time freshness for trending queries at a scale of a billion users. Covers trie versus key-value serving, merging batch rebuilds with streaming updates, skewed prefix sharding, hot-shard rebalancing, and replica synchronization.
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