Backend Engineer System Design Interview Questions
Practice 18 real System Design interview questions for Backend Engineer roles. From companies including Airbnb, Coinbase, Cursor, Databricks, Harvey.
"I got asked a hardcore MCM DP question and I saw it on PracHub as well. Solved that question in 5 minutes. Without PracHub I doubt I could solve it in 5 hours. Though somehow didn't get hired, perhaps I guess I solved it too fast? /s"
"Believe me i'm a student here jn US. Recently interviewed for MSFT. They asked me exact question from PracHub. I saw it the night before and ignored it cause why waste time on random sites. I legit wanna go back and redo this whole thing if I had chance. Not saying will work for everyone but there is certainly some merit to that website. And i'm gonna use it in future prep from now on like lc tagged"
"10 years of experience but never worked at a top company. PracHub's senior-level questions helped me break into FAANG at 35. Age is just a number."
"I was skeptical about the 'real questions' claim, so I put it to the test. I searched for the exact question I got grilled on at my last Meta onsite... and it was right there. Word for word."
"Got a Google recruiter call on Monday, interview on Friday. Crammed PracHub for 4 days. Passed every round. This platform is a miracle worker."
"I've used LC, Glassdoor, and random Discords. Nothing comes close to the accuracy here. The questions are actually current — that's what got me. Felt like I had a cheat sheet during the interview."
"The solution quality is insane. It covers approach, edge cases, time complexity, follow-ups. Nothing else comes close."
"Legit the only resource you need. TC went from 180k -> 350k. Just memorize the top 50 for your target company and you're golden."
"PracHub Premium for one month cost me the price of two coffees a week. It landed me a $280K+ starting offer."
"Literally just signed a $600k offer. I only had 2 weeks to prep, so I focused entirely on the company-tagged lists here. If you're targeting L5+, don't overthink it."
"Coaches and bootcamp prep courses cost around $200-300 but PracHub Premium is actually less than a Netflix subscription. And it landed me a $178K offer."
"I honestly don't know how you guys gather so many real interview questions. It's almost scary. I walked into my Amazon loop and recognized 3 out of 4 problems from your database."
"Discovered PracHub 10 days before my interview. By day 5, I stopped being nervous. By interview day, I was actually excited to show what I knew."
"I recently cleared Uber interviews (strong hire in the design round) and all the questions were present in prachub."
"The search is what sold me. I typed in a really niche DP problem I got asked last year and it actually came up, full breakdown and everything. These guys are clearly updating it constantly."
Design a Durable Task Scheduling Service
Design a Durable Task Scheduling Service The initial prompt is “design a task scheduler.” Begin by distinguishing an in-process timer, a durable delay...
Design Map-Based Home Search
Design Map-Based Home Search Design the backend for customers searching for homes on a map. A query supplies an arbitrary rectangular map region and m...
Design a Real-Time Asset Price Service
Design a near-real-time digital asset price service that evolves from one upstream provider to several. Cover normalized ingestion, source reconciliat...
Design a Distributed File System
This question evaluates design skills for large-scale distributed storage systems, testing understanding of distributed systems principles such as met...
Design Scalable Notification Rate Limiter
Design a production-grade rate limiter for notification sending that enforces limits at three levels of an organizational hierarchy. The system expose...
Scale Word-Frequency Processing Beyond One Machine
Design a distributed word-frequency pipeline for inputs too large for one process while preserving exact tokenization and ranking. Cover immutable obj...
Design a Rental Marketplace Backend
This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design a scalable, low-latency backend for a global vacation-rental marketplace, testing competencies...
Design a Real-Time Chess Service
Design an online chess service that supports real-time, two-player games. Users should be able to create or join a game, make legal moves, and see the...
Design a secure document vault
Design a secure document vault product similar to a cloud repository for sensitive files. The system should allow authenticated users to upload, store...
Design Idempotent Due-Date and Hold Notifications
Design Idempotent Due-Date and Hold Notifications Extend a library-management system with two notification workflows: 1. A patron receives a notificat...
Design an Instagram-like platform
This question evaluates proficiency in scalable backend architecture, distributed systems, data modeling, media storage and processing, API design, fe...
Design Correct Stateful Services for Irregular Financial Events
Design Correct Stateful Services for Irregular Financial Events Across several interview rounds, design an in-memory schemaless store, process loan pr...
Design a high-throughput ad exchange
This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design scalable, high-throughput, low-latency distributed backend systems for real-time ad exchanges,...
Design a Ride-Hailing Platform
This question evaluates competency in designing large-scale, real-time distributed systems, including distributed architecture, geo-spatial indexing a...
Design booking and settlement systems
You may be asked one or more backend-heavy system design problems such as: 1. Design a reserved-seat ticketing platform similar to a concert or sports...
Design Webhooks and Metric Aggregation
The interview report described two system design rounds: a webhook delivery platform and a vehicle metrics aggregation system. Constraints & Assumptio...
Design a Chat Analytics Backend
Design the backend of an internal analytics system for a conversational AI product similar to ChatGPT. The goal is to power an analytical metrics dash...
Design a Therapy Matching Marketplace
Design the backend for a marketplace that matches patients with therapists. The platform should support: - Patients searching for therapists by specia...