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
Amazon logo
Amazon
Hard
Software Engineer

Design a file search module like UNIX find

Design Task: Object-Oriented module that mimics UNIX find Context Design an object-oriented library that replicates the core functionality of the UNIX...

System Design
33
0
233 people solved
Aug 13, 2025
TikTok logo
TikTok
Hard
Software Engineer

Design and explain your project architecture

Question Pick one of your recent projects and walk an interviewer through its architecture end-to-end. Sketch a high-level diagram, then go deep on th...

System Design
7
0
114 people solved
Aug 13, 2025
Confluent logo
Confluent
Hard
Software Engineer

Design a distributed key-value store at scale

Design a distributed key-value store at scale System Design Prompt: Globally Distributed, Read-Optimized Key-Value Store Context and minimal assumptio...

System Design
28
0
288 people solved
Jul 26, 2025
Google logo
Google
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Design nearest-available-taxi lookup with updates

This question evaluates the ability to design scalable, low-latency geospatial lookup services under high update and query rates, assessing skills in ...

System Design
14
0
197 people solved
Jan 10, 2026
LinkedIn logo
LinkedIn
Medium
Software Engineer

Design a Top-K search words service

Scenario Design a service that tracks user search queries and returns the Top-K most searched words/queries. Requirements Functional - API to record a...

System Design
21
0
153 people solved
Oct 20, 2025
Databricks logo
Databricks
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Design KV store with sliding-window QPS metrics

This question evaluates designing an in-memory key–value store with sliding-window throughput metrics, testing competencies in data structures, concur...

System Design
21
0
265 people solved
Nov 8, 2025
Blink logo
Blink
Hard
Software Engineer

Design a Medicine Development Platform

Design a medicine development platform and explain microservice boundaries, communication, database choices, async workflows, and AI use cases. `hint ...

System Design
1
0
14 people solved
Jun 28, 2026
Atlassian logo
Atlassian
Hard
Software Engineer

Design a scalable tagging system

Design a scalable, multi-tenant tagging system that lets users attach multiple tags to arbitrary resources ("items") and query them efficiently. The s...

System Design
25
0
188 people solved
Aug 4, 2025
Databricks logo
Databricks
Medium
Software Engineer

Implement CIDR firewall matcher

Implement CIDR firewall matcher Firewall Rule Matcher for IPv4 CIDR Rules Context and Assumptions You are to design and implement a firewall rule matc...

System Design
56
0
303 people solved
Aug 4, 2025
OpenAI logo
OpenAI
Hard
Software Engineer

Design an in-memory database

Design an in-memory database System Design: In-Memory Database Engine (Single-Node Core, Scale-Out Aware) Context Design the core of an in-memory, sin...

System Design
31
0
388 people solved
Aug 4, 2025
OpenAI logo
OpenAI
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Design a Conversational AI Assistant

This question evaluates system design, distributed systems, and real-time inference-serving competencies for building large-scale conversational AI pr...

System Design
22
0
195 people solved
Jan 29, 2026
DoorDash logo
DoorDash
Hard
Software Engineer

Build an API aggregator with concurrency and retries

Build an API aggregator with concurrency and retries Build an Aggregation Service with Parallel Calls, Timeouts, Retries, and Observability Context Yo...

System Design
19
0
139 people solved
Jul 15, 2025
Anthropic logo
Anthropic
Medium
Software Engineer

Describe a Python design-and-coding approach in Colab

Python Coding-and-Design Exercise in Google Colab You are given an open-ended coding-and-design exercise to complete in Python, and the interviewer re...

System Design
36
0
400 people solved
Sep 6, 2025
HubSpot logo
HubSpot
Hard
Software Engineer

Design a near-real-time weather API

Question Design a weather data platform that retrieves best-effort hourly dumps from an external Weather Service API for approximately 2,000 locations...

System Design
17
0
216 people solved
Sep 6, 2025
Rippling logo
Rippling
Hard
Software Engineer

Implement a minimal local HTTP server

Build a Minimal Local HTTP/1.1 Server (No Frameworks) Context You are asked to implement a minimal HTTP/1.1 server from scratch using only the standar...

System Design
22
0
205 people solved
Sep 6, 2025
Anthropic logo
Anthropic
Hard
Software Engineer

Design production-ready dedup service

System Design: Production-Ready File Deduplication Service Context Design a multi-tenant cloud service that stores files and achieves space savings vi...

System Design
25
0
444 people solved
Sep 6, 2025
Google logo
Google
Hard
Software Engineer

Design key management service

Design a Key Management Service (KMS) You are asked to design a production-grade, multi-tenant Key Management Service. A client provides a key identif...

System Design
8
0
139 people solved
Sep 6, 2025
DoorDash logo
DoorDash
Hard
Software Engineer

Deep-dive a project architecture

Question Pick one of your recent, non-trivial projects and conduct a deep, end-to-end technical review. This is an open-ended architecture deep-dive: ...

System Design
25
0
346 people solved
Jul 31, 2025
DoorDash logo
DoorDash
Hard
Software Engineer

Design a distributed cron job scheduler

Design a distributed cron job scheduler System Design: Distributed Cron Job Scheduler Context You are designing a multi-tenant, internet-scale cron jo...

System Design
17
0
211 people solved
Jul 28, 2025
IBM logo
IBM
Hard
Software Engineer

Design a multithreaded CPU 1D convolution

Question Design and implement a multithreaded CPU version of the valid 1‑D convolution. Valid convolution produces an output of length M = N − K + 1, ...

System Design
9
0
92 people solved
Aug 14, 2025

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