Software Engineer System Design Interview Questions

Practice 1,082 real System Design interview questions for Software Engineer roles. From companies including Meta, OpenAI, Amazon, Anthropic, Google.

1.1k Questions 222 Companies08.11.2026
Showing 20 results
Role
DoorDash logo
DoorDash
Medium
Software Engineer

Design an Alert Notification Service for Downstream Consumers

Design an Alert Notification Service for Downstream Consumers Design an alert-notification system whose recipients are downstream services rather than...

System Design
15
0
116 people solved
Aug 4, 2026
Rippling logo
Rippling
Medium
Software Engineer

Design a News Aggregation System (Google News-style)

Design a large-scale news aggregation service similar to Google News. The system continuously discovers and crawls news articles from tens of thousand...

System Design
256
1
2844 people solved
Jun 30, 2026
Anthropic logo
Anthropic
Hard
Software Engineer

Design a Concurrent Image Processing Service

Design a Concurrent Image Processing Service Design an image-processing service in two stages. First, support one processor safely. Then scale to mult...

System Design
93
0
637 people solved
Jul 8, 2026
Pinterest logo
Pinterest
Hard
Software Engineer

Design Comment Notifications with Viral-Pin Aggregation

Design Comment Notifications with Viral-Pin Aggregation Design a system that sends a push notification to a pin owner when someone comments on the pin...

System Design
6
0
58 people solved
Aug 7, 2026
OpenAI logo
OpenAI
Medium
Software Engineer

Design a Payment Lifecycle from Hold to Charge and Settlement

Design a Payment Lifecycle from Hold to Charge and Settlement Design a payment system whose main lifecycle is hold, charge, then settlement. A hold re...

System Design
9
0
86 people solved
Aug 1, 2026
Netflix logo
Netflix
Medium
Software Engineer

Design a Distributed Frequency-Capping Service

Design a frequency-capping service for an advertising platform. Before an ad impression is served, the caller asks whether a user has already seen a c...

System Design
2
0
33 people solved
Aug 11, 2026
Plaid logo
Plaid
Medium
Software Engineer

Design an Embeddable Pay by Bank Widget

Design an Embeddable Pay by Bank Widget Design a Pay by Bank widget that online businesses can embed in checkout or bill-payment pages. The widget's i...

System Design
10
0
69 people solved
Aug 1, 2026
OpenAI logo
OpenAI
Hard
Software Engineer

Design a Large-Scale Streaming AI Product Feature

Design a Large-Scale Streaming AI Product Feature Design a product-facing AI feature for many concurrent users with streamed responses. Cover API and ...

System Design
4
0
31 people solved
Aug 11, 2026
Databricks logo
Databricks
Medium
Software EngineerSenior+

Design Chat Deletion Semantics Under Concurrent Sends

Design Chat Deletion Semantics Under Concurrent Sends Design the backend of a chat application that supports creating threads, sending messages, readi...

System Design
27
0
253 people solved
Jul 14, 2026
Rippling logo
Rippling
Medium
Software Engineer

Design a Hotel Search and Reservation System

Design a Hotel Search and Reservation System Design a hotel system with APIs, database schema, and query paths for property discovery, date-range avai...

System Design
7
0
91 people solved
Jul 22, 2026
Citadel logo
Citadel
Medium
Software EngineerSenior+

Design a Low-Latency Metrics and Alerting Platform

Design a Low-Latency Metrics and Alerting Platform Design a multi-tenant platform that collects host and application metrics, stores time-series data,...

System Design
33
0
351 people solved
Jul 12, 2026
OpenAI logo
OpenAI
Hard
Software Engineer

Design a High-Throughput Payment Authorization and Settlement System

Design a payment system that handles about 10,000 transaction requests per second. Each transaction first goes to an external payment service for appr...

System Design
3
0
24 people solved
Aug 10, 2026
Databricks logo
Databricks
Hard
Software Engineer

Design a Music Playlist Service

Design a Music Playlist Service Design a service where users create playlists, add or remove tracks, reorder items, and retrieve a playlist in playbac...

System Design
8
0
72 people solved
Jul 25, 2026
OpenAI logo
OpenAI
Medium
Software Engineer

Design Online Chess Matchmaking and Clocks

Design the backend for online chess games with skill-based matchmaking and authoritative countdown clocks. Players enter a queue for a selected time c...

System Design
2
0
27 people solved
Aug 8, 2026
Google logo
Google
Medium
Software Engineer

Design a Billing-Token Rate Limiter for AI Agents

Design a Billing-Token Rate Limiter for AI Agents Design a rate limiter that controls the number of billing tokens consumed by AI-agent requests. Requ...

System Design
3
0
44 people solved
Aug 1, 2026
OpenAI logo
OpenAI
Hard
Software Engineer Locked

Design the GPU Job Scheduler for a Text-to-Video Generation Service

This system design question evaluates a candidate's ability to design a resource-scheduling layer for scarce, expensive compute under sustained overlo...

System Design
62
1
1114 people solved
Jun 26, 2026
Replit logo
Replit
Medium
Software Engineer

Design a Multi-Channel Notification System

Design a Multi-Channel Notification System Design a system that accepts notification requests and delivers them through configured channels such as in...

System Design
3
0
31 people solved
Aug 3, 2026
Databricks logo
Databricks
Hard
Software Engineer

Design Chat APIs, Storage, and Core Message Flows

Design Chat APIs, Storage, and Core Message Flows Design the API and database model for a chat service. Cover direct and group conversations, sending ...

System Design
3
0
55 people solved
Jul 25, 2026
Apple logo
Apple
Medium
Software Engineer

Design a Distributed Token-Bucket Rate Limiter

Design a distributed rate limiter using token buckets. Each user or API key has a bucket with a fixed capacity. Tokens refill at a configured rate, an...

System Design
1
0
17 people solved
Aug 9, 2026
Asana logo
Asana
Medium
Software Engineer

Design a Real-Time Like Counter for Collaborative Tasks

Design a Real-Time Like Counter for Collaborative Tasks Design the backend and client-update flow for a collaborative task product in which signed-in ...

System Design
10
0
211 people solved
Jul 16, 2026

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