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
Apple logo
Apple
Hard
Software EngineerNew Grad Locked

Design a smartwatch sensor subsystem

This question evaluates system-level engineering skills for designing a smartwatch sensing subsystem, including sensor selection, trade-offs among acc...

System Design
22
1
189 people solved
Feb 25, 2026
Coinbase logo
Coinbase
Hard
Software Engineer

Design a Cryptocurrency Trading System with Third-Party Exchanges

Design a Cryptocurrency Trading System with Third-Party Exchanges Design a cryptocurrency trading platform that routes client orders to one or more th...

System Design
28
0
235 people solved
Aug 4, 2025
Rippling logo
Rippling
Hard
Software Engineer Locked

Design a hotel search and booking system

This question evaluates a candidate's ability in large-scale system design, covering distributed architecture, data modeling for hotels and availabili...

System Design
33
0
374 people solved
Dec 8, 2025
Bobyard logo
Bobyard
Medium
Software Engineer

Design comments and async image generation

The system design portion combined two prompts: 1. Design a full-stack comment system with frontend, backend, and database support for create, read, u...

System Design
1
0
23 people solved
Apr 9, 2026
Rippling logo
Rippling
Medium
Software Engineer

Design a delivery cost dashboard with payments

Design a delivery cost dashboard with payments Object-Oriented Delivery Cost Dashboard Service Goal Design and implement an object-oriented service to...

System Design
34
0
241 people solved
Aug 1, 2025
Capital One logo
Capital One
Medium
Software Engineer

Design a cross-region event processing platform

Scenario Design a cross-region event processing platform that ingests events from producers, stores them durably, and delivers them to multiple consum...

System Design
17
0
195 people solved
Dec 25, 2025
OpenAI logo
OpenAI
Easy
Software Engineer

Design a Payment System

Design a Payment System Design the backend payment system for an online platform that charges customers for goods and services (for example, a marketp...

System Design
1
0
20 people solved
Mar 16, 2026
Roblox logo
Roblox
Hard
Software Engineer

Design a real-time favorites service at scale

Design: Real-Time Favorites/Unfavorites Service at High Scale Context Design a backend service that lets users favorite/unfavorite items (e.g., posts,...

System Design
19
0
199 people solved
Aug 12, 2025
Bloomberg logo
Bloomberg
Medium
Software Engineer

Design a packet reassembler API

Design a PacketAssembler API for Streaming Fragments Context and Assumptions - You are building a small component that assembles packets from a byte s...

System Design
15
0
166 people solved
Sep 6, 2025
Circle logo
Circle
Hard
Software Engineer

Design banking payment scheduling system

Design banking payment scheduling system System Design: Banking Payment System Enhancements Context You are building a minimal bank-transfer payment o...

System Design
14
0
178 people solved
Aug 4, 2025
Anthropic logo
Anthropic
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

How would you scale batch image pipelines?

This question evaluates a candidate's competence in designing scalable, reliable batch image-processing pipelines, testing knowledge of distributed sy...

System Design
26
0
486 people solved
Nov 10, 2025
Netflix logo
Netflix
Hard
Software Engineer

Design ads frequency capping service

Design an Ads Frequency Capping Service Context You are designing a service that ensures a user does not see the same ad creative or campaign more tha...

System Design
37
0
577 people solved
Jul 17, 2025
Netflix logo
Netflix
Medium
Software EngineerSenior+

Design an Ad Frequency Capping System

Design a frequency capping system for an advertising platform. A frequency cap limits how many times a user can be shown an ad, campaign, line item, o...

System Design
12
0
153 people solved
Apr 3, 2026
Temporal logo
Temporal
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Design a One-to-One Chat System

This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design scalable, real-time backend architectures for one-to-one messaging, covering competencies in d...

System Design
5
0
65 people solved
Apr 3, 2026
Google logo
Google
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Design a Twitter hashtag metrics aggregator

This question evaluates competency in designing scalable, low-latency real-time stream processing and aggregation systems, covering concepts such as w...

System Design
11
0
111 people solved
Dec 15, 2025
Airbnb logo
Airbnb
Hard
Software Engineer Locked

Design a user activity query system

This question evaluates a candidate's system design skills, including scalable data modeling, time-and-geo indexing, API design, storage and serving a...

System Design
19
0
329 people solved
Dec 15, 2025
Docker logo
Docker
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Design a container image registry

This question evaluates a candidate's competency in designing large-scale distributed systems for artifact storage and delivery, including storage arc...

System Design
6
0
47 people solved
Feb 14, 2026
Coinbase logo
Coinbase
Medium
Software Engineer

Design account system with cashback

Design account system with cashback System Design: Account Management with Transfers, Payments, and Cashback You are to design and implement an in-mem...

System Design
96
0
372 people solved
Jul 29, 2025
Perplexity AI logo
Perplexity AI
Hard
Software Engineer

Diagnose overloaded Kubernetes cluster

Kubernetes Overload: End-to-End Debug + Mitigation Plan You are given a Kubernetes-based microservices system that is currently overloaded, exhibiting...

System Design
12
0
101 people solved
Aug 13, 2025
Remitly logo
Remitly
Hard
Software Engineer

Design a Production-Ready URL Shortener

System Design: Production-Ready URL Shortening Service Goal Design a production-ready URL shortening service that can issue short links, resolve them ...

System Design
10
0
94 people solved
Aug 13, 2025

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