Prevent a Cache Stampede on a Hot Key
Company: ByteDance
Role: Software Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Technical Screen
Overview: Design protection against a cache stampede when a hot key expires across many application instances. Compare request coalescing, distributed refresh ownership, jitter, stale-while-revalidate, negative caching, and failure behavior while preserving an explicit freshness contract.
Read the full ByteDance Software Engineer interview experience this question came from