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
Rippling logo
Rippling
Hard
Software Engineer

Design a Google News-like aggregator

Design a Google News–like News Aggregation Platform Design a multi-region news aggregation platform (in the spirit of Google News) that ingests conten...

System Design
41
0
305 people solved
Sep 6, 2025
Google logo
Google
Hard
Software Engineer

Design task scheduler with dependencies

Design a Distributed Task Scheduling Infrastructure Context Design a distributed task scheduling and orchestration system that can run at scale, suppo...

System Design
24
0
262 people solved
Sep 6, 2025
Mercor logo
Mercor
Medium
Software Engineer

Explain VPCs and private/public network connectivity

What is a VPC (Virtual Private Cloud)? Explain the difference between a private network and a public network/subnet. How do private subnets connect to...

System Design
16
0
117 people solved
Jan 17, 2026
Netflix logo
Netflix
Medium
Software Engineer

Model data for an ads platform

Design a data model (logical schema) for an advertising platform. Include core entities such as: - Business/account (advertiser) - Campaign and budget...

System Design
56
0
396 people solved
Jan 30, 2026
Pinterest logo
Pinterest
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Design autocomplete and merchant bulk edits

This question evaluates a candidate's system design competency across real-time search/autocomplete and large-scale product update pipelines, covering...

System Design
18
0
207 people solved
Nov 11, 2025
Confluent logo
Confluent
Medium
Software EngineerSenior+

Design a Reliable URL Shortening Service

Design a Reliable URL Shortening Service Design a service that accepts a long URL and returns a short URL, then redirects short-code requests to the s...

System Design
1
0
25 people solved
Jan 1, 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
xAI logo
xAI
Easy
Software Engineer Locked

Design a multi-level API rate limiter

This question evaluates understanding of rate limiting, distributed system design, concurrency control, scalability, and operational observability whe...

System Design
29
0
288 people solved
Feb 11, 2026
Netflix logo
Netflix
Medium
Software Engineer

Design Rolling-Window Ad Frequency Capping

Design a frequency-capping service for an advertising platform. The ad platform receives ad requests for users and must decide whether a candidate ad,...

System Design
23
0
163 people solved
Apr 17, 2026
Discord logo
Discord
Medium
Software Engineer

Design leader election using Redis leases

Design Leader Election Using Redis Leases You have N stateless service instances all running the same code. At any instant, exactly one instance must ...

System Design
39
0
307 people solved
Oct 25, 2025
Palantir logo
Palantir
Hard
Software Engineer

Design an internal interest-matching platform

Design an internal interest-matching platform System Design Prompt: Internal Employee Interest Matching Platform Context Design an internal-only platf...

System Design
54
0
528 people solved
Jul 15, 2025
Retell logo
Retell
Hard
Software Engineer

Design a Cloud Call-Center Platform for Programmatic Outbound Calls

A SaaS company offers a programmatic calling platform. Business customers (enterprises) integrate through an API: they submit a request to place an ou...

System Design
2
0
36 people solved
Jan 10, 2026
Airbnb logo
Airbnb
Hard
Software Engineer

Design rental watchlist and notification system

Design a Rental Listing Watchlist and Availability-Notification System You are designing a feature for a vacation-rental marketplace (Airbnb-style). A...

System Design
67
0
469 people solved
Sep 6, 2025
Akuna Capital logo
Akuna Capital
Medium
Software Engineer

Implement a two-user communications handler

One-at-a-time Two-User Communications Handler Context Design and implement a communications handler that supports exactly one active conversation at a...

System Design
16
0
113 people solved
Sep 6, 2025
Shield Ai logo
Shield Ai
Easy
Software EngineerSenior+ Locked

Design a Dependency-Aware CI/CD Pipeline

Design a dependency-aware CI/CD platform that schedules DAG jobs on isolated runners and preserves logs, artifacts, and durable execution state. Addre...

System Design
0
0
11 people solved
May 25, 2026
Meta logo
Meta
Easy
Software EngineerSenior+

Design a location-based radius top-K search

Design a location-based search service. Input: - latitude, longitude - radius (meters) - K Output: - The top K locations within the radius. The term “...

System Design
34
0
295 people solved
Mar 11, 2026
Uber logo
Uber
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Design A URL Shortener

This question evaluates skills in large-scale system design, covering distributed systems, API design, data modeling and storage, caching, short-code ...

System Design
18
0
135 people solved
May 4, 2026
Microsoft logo
Microsoft
Medium
Software Engineer

Design read-heavy org chart subordinate counts

You are given manager→direct-report relationships for an organization (an employee has at most one direct manager; the top-level employee has none). B...

System Design
10
0
94 people solved
Feb 7, 2026
Grammarly logo
Grammarly
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Design a restaurant reservation system

This question evaluates system design competencies including API design, data modeling, distributed systems considerations, consistency and transactio...

System Design
15
0
133 people solved
Jan 22, 2026
Google logo
Google
Hard
Software Engineer

Design a global restaurant menu update system

Design a menu update system for a global chain of restaurants. Context: - The chain operates in many countries. - Each restaurant may have multiple ki...

System Design
13
0
150 people solved
Nov 12, 2025

Explore more Software Engineer System Design interview questions

Real questions from candidate reports, grouped by company, topic and role.

By company
Other categories for Software Engineer
System Design questions for other roles
Browse all