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
Google logo
Google
Hard
Software Engineer

Design a distributed rate limiter

Design a Rate Limiter with Burst Allowance and Distributed Coordination Context You are designing a rate limiter for an API gateway that serves high Q...

System Design
14
0
139 people solved
Sep 6, 2025
Google logo
Google
Hard
Software Engineer

Design high-throughput event subscription system

Design an Event Ingestion and Subscription System Context You are asked to design a horizontally scalable platform where producers send high-volume ev...

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

Design a distributed system end-to-end

System Design: Multi-Tenant Interactive Analytics Platform Context Design a distributed, multi-tenant analytics service that lets customers: - Ingest ...

System Design
23
0
272 people solved
Sep 6, 2025
DoorDash logo
DoorDash
Hard
Software Engineer

Design a notification system

System Design: Multi-Channel Notification Platform Context Design a multi-tenant notification platform that delivers messages across email, SMS, and m...

System Design
30
0
242 people solved
Sep 6, 2025
Instacart logo
Instacart
Hard
Software Engineer

Design scalable inventory system and avoid races

System Design: Scalable, Highly Available Inventory Management Context Design an inventory management system for a high-traffic e-commerce platform th...

System Design
29
0
258 people solved
Sep 6, 2025
Coinbase logo
Coinbase
Medium
Software Engineer

Implement a multi-step form in React

Build a Multi‑Step Form Component in React Context You are implementing a multi‑step web form in React. The form gathers user data over several steps ...

System Design
15
0
116 people solved
Sep 6, 2025
Rippling logo
Rippling
Medium
Software Engineer

Extend rules for trip-level aggregates and outputs

Extend rules for trip-level aggregates and outputs Extend Rules Engine: Aggregate Trip-Level Policies Context You previously built an expense policy e...

System Design
19
0
247 people solved
Aug 7, 2025
Microsoft logo
Microsoft
Hard
Software Engineer Locked

Design a URL Shortener

This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design a scalable, highly available URL-shortening service, testing competencies in API design, short...

System Design
8
0
57 people solved
Mar 20, 2026
Turo logo
Turo
Medium
Software Engineer

Plan a major database version upgrade

You have an application tier (API/web servers) talking to a primary database for writes and a secondary/replica database for reads. You need to perfor...

System Design
12
0
97 people solved
Feb 12, 2026
Turo logo
Turo
Medium
Software Engineer

Route HTTP requests to pods in a cluster

In a Docker/Kubernetes-like container cluster running multiple replicas (pods) of a service, explain how an incoming HTTP request reaches a specific p...

System Design
8
0
68 people solved
Feb 12, 2026
Snapchat logo
Snapchat
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Design a device owner lookup service

This question evaluates a candidate's understanding of system design concepts such as real-time event ingestion, handling out-of-order and duplicate e...

System Design
6
0
92 people solved
Feb 12, 2026
Snapchat logo
Snapchat
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Design real-time ad impression and spend tracking

This question evaluates system design and distributed systems skills, focusing on real-time event ingestion, accurate counter aggregation, low-latency...

System Design
7
0
113 people solved
Feb 12, 2026
Sonatus logo
Sonatus
Hard
Software Engineer

Design a RAG system for vehicle documents

Design a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architecture to power a Q&A chatbot over vehicle documentation. Document types & characteristics - Sourc...

System Design
9
0
69 people solved
Feb 12, 2026
TikTok logo
TikTok
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Choose tools for scalable distributed systems

This question evaluates proficiency in designing scalable distributed systems, testing requirement analysis (latency, throughput, durability, consiste...

System Design
7
0
99 people solved
Feb 11, 2026
Robinhood logo
Robinhood
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Design a job scheduler with SLA and logs

This question evaluates understanding of distributed job scheduling, SLA enforcement, observability, and fault-tolerant execution across worker fleets...

System Design
22
0
149 people solved
Feb 11, 2026
Roblox logo
Roblox
Hard
Software Engineer

Design the manual review workflow

Design the manual review workflow System Design: Human-in-the-Loop Review Subsystem Context You are designing a human-in-the-loop (HITL) review subsys...

System Design
12
0
147 people solved
Jul 31, 2025
Parafin logo
Parafin
Hard
Software Engineer

Design a loan application system

Design a loan application system System Design: End-to-End Online Loan Application Platform Context Design a small online lending platform where appli...

System Design
27
0
329 people solved
Jul 31, 2025
DoorDash logo
DoorDash
Medium
Software Engineer

Protect SLA and Choose Storage

You own a service that calculates delivery-order payments from order lifecycle events. Discuss two design questions: 1. If an upstream dependency sudd...

System Design
12
0
110 people solved
Jan 9, 2026
Databricks logo
Databricks
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Design a Slack-like messaging system

This question evaluates system design and distributed-systems competencies, focusing on real-time messaging architecture, data modeling, scalability, ...

System Design
16
0
210 people solved
Dec 8, 2025
Carvana logo
Carvana
Easy
Software Engineer

Design an Attendance Payroll Service

Design the backend service for an employee attendance system. The service should support: - Employees clocking in and clocking out. - Computing each e...

System Design
2
0
35 people solved
Apr 26, 2026

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