Design ticketing and coding practice platforms

Q: Design ticketing and coding practice platforms

This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design large-scale, distributed systems focusing on data modeling, API design, concurrency control, transactional guarantees, scalability, and secure execution environments.

Q: How do I approach System Design interview questions?

System Design questions require understanding of core concepts and practice. PracHub provides solutions with explanations to help you master system design interviews.

Q: What difficulty level is this interview question?

This is a medium difficulty System Design question, commonly asked during Onsite rounds at Meta.

Q: What role is this question designed for?

This question is commonly asked for Software Engineer candidates at Meta during technical interviews.

Question

You are asked two separate system design questions.

1. Design an online event ticketing platform (like Ticketmaster)

Design a large-scale web service where users can:

Browse events (concerts, sports, theater) by city/date/venue.
View seating charts and real-time seat availability.
Select specific seats and purchase tickets.
Receive a digital ticket/QR code.

Assume:

Millions of users, with traffic spikes when popular events go on sale.
Each event has a finite set of seats, and overselling must not happen.
There may be waitlists or temporary seat holds while a user is checking out.

Describe a high-level design that covers:

Main functional requirements and non-functional goals (availability, consistency, latency).
Core APIs (e.g., search events, hold seats, purchase tickets).
Data model for events, venues, seats, reservations, and orders.
How to prevent double-booking the same seat under high concurrency.
Overall architecture: services, databases, caches, message queues.
Strategies for scaling, handling flash-sale spikes, and ensuring reliability.

2. Design an online coding practice & interview-prep platform

Design a web platform where users can:

Browse and search a catalog of coding problems by tags/difficulty.
View problem statements and constraints.
Write code in the browser in multiple languages.
Run code against sample tests and hidden test cases.
Submit solutions and see whether they passed, with basic statistics.

Assume:

Millions of registered users, globally distributed.
Spiky traffic (e.g., evenings and weekends are busier).
Code must run in a secure, resource-isolated environment.

Describe a high-level design that covers:

Key functional requirements and non-functional goals.
Core APIs (e.g., list problems, get problem details, submit code, get results).
Data model for users, problems, test cases, submissions, and results.
Architecture for the code-execution service (sandboxing, job queue, worker nodes).
Storage choices for code, problem metadata, and execution logs.
Strategies for scaling, ensuring fairness in resource usage, and system reliability.

For both systems, state reasonable assumptions and provide a clear, component-level architecture with major trade-offs explained.

Design ticketing and coding practice platforms

Quick Overview

1. Design an online event ticketing platform (like Ticketmaster)

2. Design an online coding practice & interview-prep platform

Solution

Comments (0)