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 223 Companies08.16.2026
Showing 20 results
Role
Meta logo
Meta
Medium
Software Engineer

Design a distributed job scheduler

Question Design a distributed job scheduler that can run background jobs at specific times or on recurring schedules (similar to cron but scalable and...

System Design
9
0
67 people solved
Dec 8, 2025
Harvey logo
Harvey
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Design a Cloud File Storage Service

This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design scalable, secure distributed file storage systems, covering competencies in file and folder hi...

System Design
9
0
125 people solved
Feb 25, 2026
xAI logo
xAI
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Design a backend for an online checkers game

This question evaluates system design and backend engineering competencies, including authoritative game-state modeling, turn-based concurrency contro...

System Design
19
0
151 people solved
Feb 11, 2026
Grammarly logo
Grammarly
Medium
Software Engineer

Design a Figma-like collaborative editor

System Design: Collaborative design editor (Figma/Google Docs style) Design the backend (and key client interactions) for a real-time collaborative de...

System Design
8
0
161 people solved
Feb 11, 2026
Roblox logo
Roblox
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Design favorites and social game recommendations

This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design scalable backend systems for social features, assessing competencies in data modeling, event-d...

System Design
34
0
251 people solved
Feb 11, 2026
NVIDIA logo
NVIDIA
Hard
Software Engineer Locked

Design a URL shortening service

This question evaluates systems design skills including scalable architecture, data modeling, low-latency routing, availability, and operational conce...

System Design
7
0
106 people solved
Feb 11, 2026
Walmart Labs logo
Walmart Labs
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Design Spring Boot for high availability and background work

This question evaluates a candidate's competency in designing highly available, load-balanced Spring Boot applications and architecting resilient back...

System Design
11
0
91 people solved
Jan 6, 2026
Imc logo
Imc
Medium
Software Engineer

Design an in-memory hotel booking system

Design a hotel booking system that supports reservations without using any database. You may only use in-memory data structures. Requirements Define A...

System Design
32
0
252 people solved
Nov 3, 2025
Anthropic logo
Anthropic
Hard
Software Engineer

Design a desktop AI chat frontend

Design a Frontend Architecture for a Cross-Platform Desktop Conversational AI App Context You are designing the frontend architecture for a cross-plat...

System Design
42
0
843 people solved
Sep 6, 2025
Mercor logo
Mercor
Medium
Software Engineer

Compare streaming frameworks and delivery semantics

Name popular streaming/data-processing frameworks (e.g., Kafka-based stacks, Flink, Spark Streaming, etc.). Explain at-most-once, at-least-once, and e...

System Design
14
0
152 people solved
Jan 17, 2026
Databricks logo
Databricks
Hard
Software EngineerNew Grad Locked

Design a digital game shop backend

This question evaluates system design skills including transactional data modeling, API design, service decomposition, and reliability concerns for mo...

System Design
49
0
350 people solved
Dec 10, 2025
LinkedIn logo
LinkedIn
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Design a malicious-URL checking service using an isMalicious API

This question evaluates system design competencies such as scalable API design, caching and cache invalidation strategies, rate limiting and backpress...

System Design
16
0
209 people solved
Jan 12, 2026
Affirm logo
Affirm
Medium
Software EngineerSenior+ Locked

Design restaurant shift scheduling

This question evaluates skills in data modeling, backend system architecture, API design, scalability engineering, and consistency management for a mu...

System Design
8
0
108 people solved
Mar 3, 2026
Pinterest logo
Pinterest
Hard
Software Engineer

Design a high-throughput distributed rate limiter

Question Design a high-throughput, distributed rate-limiting service that runs across multiple regions with low latency and burst tolerance. The servi...

System Design
15
0
247 people solved
Sep 6, 2025
Coinbase logo
Coinbase
Hard
Software Engineer

Design real-time stock price viewer

System Design: Real‑Time Stock Prices Viewer (No History) You are designing a real‑time system that lets clients view current stock prices only. No hi...

System Design
28
0
245 people solved
Sep 6, 2025
Booking logo
Booking
Medium
Software Engineer

Design a Real-Time Logging System

Design a logging/telemetry system for a large application platform. Requirements: - Many services send log or metric events to the system - Event subm...

System Design
6
0
122 people solved
Mar 15, 2026
Bloomberg logo
Bloomberg
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Design a Global Marketing Email Platform

This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design a scalable, reliable distributed system for global marketing email delivery, encompassing time...

System Design
18
0
163 people solved
Jan 21, 2026
Pinterest logo
Pinterest
Medium
Software Engineer

Design highly available blob storage service

Design a large-scale, highly available blob storage service similar to Amazon S3. The service should allow clients to store, retrieve, and delete arbi...

System Design
25
0
191 people solved
Sep 10, 2025
Affirm logo
Affirm
Hard
Software Engineer Locked

Design an A/B Testing Platform

This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design scalable, reliable experimentation and analytics platforms, testing competencies in distribute...

System Design
13
0
122 people solved
Feb 27, 2026
Snowflake logo
Snowflake
Hard
Software Engineer Locked

Design an ACL authorization checking service

This question evaluates system design and security architecture skills, focusing on centralized authorization/ACL models, API and data modeling, cachi...

System Design
40
0
289 people solved
Jan 6, 2026

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