Software Engineer System Design Interview Questions

Practice 1,093 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
Applied Intuition logo
Applied Intuition
Hard
Software Engineer

Walk through a recent project design

System Design: End-to-End Project Walkthrough Provide a structured walkthrough of a recent project you led end-to-end. Organize your answer using the ...

System Design
24
0
170 people solved
Sep 6, 2025
Snowflake logo
Snowflake
Hard
Software Engineer

Design under vague distributed requirements

System Design Prompt: Distributed Metadata Catalog and Schema Registry Context Design a multi-tenant distributed Metadata Catalog and Schema Registry ...

System Design
10
0
170 people solved
Sep 6, 2025
Fanatics logo
Fanatics
Hard
Software Engineer

Design a retail trading platform

Design a Retail Stock Trading Platform (Robinhood-like) Design a mobile-first retail stock trading platform for U.S. equities, similar to Robinhood. T...

System Design
41
0
379 people solved
Sep 6, 2025
Chime logo
Chime
Easy
Software Engineer

Design load balancing, caching, and idempotent APIs

You are designing a backend service that will be deployed across multiple instances behind a load balancer. Answer the following: 1) Load balancing - ...

System Design
42
0
372 people solved
Nov 13, 2025
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
154 people solved
Oct 20, 2025
Salesforce logo
Salesforce
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Design a TikTok-like short video platform

This question evaluates skills in large-scale system design for short-video platforms, including video ingestion and transcoding, storage and CDN stra...

System Design
21
0
339 people solved
Mar 1, 2026
Okta logo
Okta
Medium
Software EngineerSenior+ Locked

Design a Metrics Storage Platform

This question evaluates system-design and distributed-systems skills for time-series metrics storage, focusing on data modeling for counters, gauges, ...

System Design
8
0
62 people solved
Mar 30, 2026
Meta logo
Meta
Medium
Software Engineer

Design an online auction system

Design an online auction system (eBay-style). Requirements: - Users create auctions with start/end time and starting price. - Users place bids; system...

System Design
8
0
63 people solved
Feb 25, 2026
Apple logo
Apple
Hard
Software Engineer

Implement a robust REST API method

Implement a robust REST API method Design and implement a REST API method to create a resource with idempotency Context You are building a create endp...

System Design
24
0
183 people solved
Jul 15, 2025
Parafin logo
Parafin
Hard
Software Engineer

Design loan application system

Design an End-to-End Loan Application Platform You are a software engineer at a small lending startup. Design a scalable, compliant loan origination s...

System Design
65
0
456 people solved
Aug 4, 2025
LinkedIn logo
LinkedIn
Medium
Software EngineerSenior+ Locked

Design a metrics platform without alerting

This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design a scalable time-series metrics platform, covering data modeling for counters/gauges/histograms...

System Design
16
0
176 people solved
Dec 26, 2025
Amazon logo
Amazon
Hard
Software Engineer

Design an online bookstore for browse and purchase

Design an online bookstore for browse and purchase System Design: Online Bookstore (Browse + Purchase) Context Design an online bookstore that allows ...

System Design
4
0
60 people solved
Jul 31, 2025
Microsoft logo
Microsoft
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Design an Event Booking System

This question evaluates system architecture, distributed systems, data modeling, concurrency control for seat inventory, transactional integrity for b...

System Design
3
0
57 people solved
Feb 22, 2026
Meta logo
Meta
Medium
Software EngineerSenior+ Locked

Troubleshoot a single-node web outage

This question evaluates operational troubleshooting, root-cause analysis, and resilience design skills for a single-node web server, testing a candida...

System Design
4
0
64 people solved
Jan 22, 2026
Apple logo
Apple
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Design ad click aggregator and file sync service

This question evaluates system design competencies in building scalable, reliable distributed services—covering high-throughput event ingestion and ag...

System Design
23
0
256 people solved
Jan 22, 2026
Microsoft logo
Microsoft
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Design REST APIs for JSON file storage

This question evaluates system design and RESTful API skills for building JSON document storage, covering metadata modeling, concurrency control, auth...

System Design
6
0
114 people solved
Jan 22, 2026
Netflix logo
Netflix
Hard
Software Engineer Locked

Model data for an ads platform

This question evaluates a candidate's competency in data modeling and database architecture for large-scale advertising systems, including relational ...

System Design
32
0
314 people solved
Jan 20, 2026
Tesla logo
Tesla
Medium
Software Engineer

Describe how you use Kubernetes

Describe how you use Kubernetes System Design: Practical Kubernetes (K8s) Use and Operations Context: In a technical screen, you are asked to describe...

System Design
15
0
134 people solved
Jul 26, 2025
Verkada logo
Verkada
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Design real-time per-status device counts

This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design scalable, fault-tolerant real-time aggregation systems that produce per-minute status counts, ...

System Design
9
0
179 people solved
Jan 19, 2026
Uber logo
Uber
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Design Nearby Restaurant Search

This question evaluates competency in large-scale system design for low-latency geospatial search, covering concepts such as geospatial indexing, cand...

System Design
18
0
160 people solved
May 1, 2026

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