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
Confluent logo
Confluent
Medium
Software EngineerSenior+

Design a News Feed and Mail Service

Design the following systems: 1. Aggregate news feed Build a service that ingests articles from many publishers, deduplicates and ranks them, and s...

System Design
25
0
191 people solved
Feb 22, 2026
Vercel logo
Vercel
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Design Collaborative Document Editing

This question evaluates system design and real-time collaboration competencies, including architectural scalability, low-latency synchronization, cons...

System Design
8
0
74 people solved
May 23, 2026
Citadel logo
Citadel
Hard
Software Engineer

Design a low-latency trading system

System Design: Low-Latency Electronic Trading Platform (Equities) You are designing a single-region electronic trading platform (exchange/ATS-like) th...

System Design
105
0
1096 people solved
Aug 9, 2025
Citadel logo
Citadel
Easy
Software Engineer Locked

Design stock price time-series store and query

This question evaluates system design skills for time-series data storage and querying, covering scalability, partitioning, indexing, event-time handl...

System Design
40
0
314 people solved
Jan 22, 2026
Salesforce logo
Salesforce
Medium
Software Engineer

Design a coffee ordering system

System Design: Coffee Ordering System Design a system for a coffee shop (and later a chain of stores) that lets customers order drinks for pickup or i...

System Design
799
4
7418 people solved
Jan 22, 2026
Harvey logo
Harvey
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Design a RAG question-answering system

This question evaluates system design and machine-learning engineering competencies for building Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, includi...

System Design
17
0
316 people solved
Mar 1, 2026
Confluent logo
Confluent
Hard
Software Engineer

Design a temporary email service

Design a Disposable Email Service with Auto-Expiring Addresses Design a receive-only disposable email service (e.g., 10‑minute inboxes) that issues au...

System Design
106
0
826 people solved
Jul 27, 2025
Anthropic logo
Anthropic
Medium
Software Engineer

Design a One-to-One Chat System

Design a One-to-One Chat System The source identifies a one-to-one chat system as the design topic without specifying scale or product behavior. For t...

System Design
1
0
13 people solved
May 9, 2026
OpenAI logo
OpenAI
Hard
Software Engineer

Design GPU credit allocator

Design a GPU Credit Allocation System Design a GPU credit allocation system for a multi-tenant compute platform (for example, OpenAI's GPU infrastruct...

System Design
341
0
2589 people solved
Aug 4, 2025
Axon logo
Axon
Hard
Software Engineer

Design an airline booking system

System Design: Airline Booking System Design an airline booking platform that lets travelers search for flights, book them, select seats, and modify o...

System Design
83
0
721 people solved
Aug 7, 2025
OpenAI logo
OpenAI
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Design CI/CD Build Caching

This question evaluates design skills around CI/CD build caching, including distinguishing cache types (dependency caches, compiler outputs, container...

System Design
21
0
323 people solved
May 26, 2026
Palantir logo
Palantir
Hard
Software Engineer

Design a scalable interview question bank

Design a scalable interview question bank System Design: Scalable Interview Question Bank Platform Context Design a multi-tenant SaaS platform for org...

System Design
41
0
325 people solved
Jul 26, 2025
Affirm logo
Affirm
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Design an A/B testing platform

This question evaluates the ability to design an end-to-end A/B testing platform, assessing competencies in distributed systems architecture, data mod...

System Design
20
0
180 people solved
Mar 7, 2026
C3 AI logo
C3 AI
Easy
Software Engineer

Design a restaurant reservation system

Problem Design a restaurant reservation system similar to common booking products. The system should allow customers to search availability and book t...

System Design
15
0
186 people solved
Nov 7, 2025
Google logo
Google
Hard
Software Engineer Locked

Design a pub-sub replay system

This question evaluates a candidate's skills in distributed systems and streaming architectures, including pub-sub replay semantics, message ordering,...

System Design
24
0
455 people solved
Mar 6, 2026
Instacart logo
Instacart
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Design Asset Storage System

This question evaluates proficiency in system design for scalable, durable asset storage and delivery, encompassing distributed storage, metadata mode...

System Design
14
0
196 people solved
May 30, 2026
Netflix logo
Netflix
Hard
Software Engineer

Design a File Backup System

Design a scalable file backup system. You are given access to basic file-system primitives such as listing directories, reading file metadata, reading...

System Design
23
0
204 people solved
Apr 11, 2026
Citadel logo
Citadel
Hard
Software EngineerSenior+ Locked

Design a low-latency trading platform

This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design a low-latency, real-time trading system, covering competencies in distributed systems, streami...

System Design
21
0
188 people solved
Jan 26, 2026
Netflix logo
Netflix
Medium
Software EngineerSenior+ Locked

Design Ad Frequency and Order Tracking

This question evaluates system-design competencies for building low-latency, high-throughput ad-platform components—specifically a real-time frequency...

System Design
39
0
457 people solved
Apr 26, 2026
Databricks logo
Databricks
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Design a stock order manager

This question evaluates a candidate's ability to model and manage order lifecycle and state reconciliation, along with understanding of distributed-sy...

System Design
101
0
971 people solved
Apr 12, 2026

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