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Design Real-Time Trending Likes

Last updated: Jun 13, 2026

Quick Overview

This question evaluates skills in designing scalable, low-latency real-time analytics systems, covering stream processing, time-windowed aggregations, high-throughput ingestion, state management, and geo-partitioned querying within the System Design category.

  • medium
  • Bytedance
  • System Design
  • Software Engineer

Design Real-Time Trending Likes

Company: Bytedance

Role: Software Engineer

Category: System Design

Difficulty: medium

Interview Round: Technical Screen

Design a real-time analytics service for a large social platform. The service receives like and unlike events for posts. It must support the following queries: 1. Given a `post_id`, return the number of likes that post received in the last 60 seconds. 2. Return the global top `K` posts by number of likes received in the last 60 seconds. 3. Return the top `K` posts by number of likes received in the last 60 seconds for a given region. Assume the platform may receive up to about 1 million like events per second at peak. The system should have low read latency and tolerate high write throughput. Clarify whether the 60-second window is a sliding window or tumbling window, whether counts must be exact or approximate, how regions are defined, and whether unlikes should decrement the counts.

Quick Answer: This question evaluates skills in designing scalable, low-latency real-time analytics systems, covering stream processing, time-windowed aggregations, high-throughput ingestion, state management, and geo-partitioned querying within the System Design category.

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Bytedance
May 26, 2026, 12:00 AM
Software Engineer
Technical Screen
System Design
0
0

Design a real-time analytics service for a large social platform.

The service receives like and unlike events for posts. It must support the following queries:

  1. Given a post_id , return the number of likes that post received in the last 60 seconds.
  2. Return the global top K posts by number of likes received in the last 60 seconds.
  3. Return the top K posts by number of likes received in the last 60 seconds for a given region.

Assume the platform may receive up to about 1 million like events per second at peak. The system should have low read latency and tolerate high write throughput. Clarify whether the 60-second window is a sliding window or tumbling window, whether counts must be exact or approximate, how regions are defined, and whether unlikes should decrement the counts.

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