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
OpenAI logo
OpenAI
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Design a URL Shortener

This question evaluates system design and distributed systems competencies, including scalability, availability, data modeling, API design, caching, s...

System Design
6
0
86 people solved
Jan 19, 2026
Lambda logo
Lambda
Hard
Software Engineer

Design and explain infra, K8s, routing, and fleet

System Design and Operations Deep-Dive Context: You are interviewing for a Software Engineer role with a focus on system design and engineering. Provi...

System Design
12
0
83 people solved
Sep 6, 2025
Anthropic logo
Anthropic
Hard
Software Engineer

Optimize a compute kernel with a simulator

Performance Optimization Plan for a Compute Kernel Context You are given: - A compute kernel (single critical function or set of loops) to optimize. -...

System Design
17
0
234 people solved
Sep 6, 2025
Google logo
Google
Hard
Software Engineer

Diagnose distributed database inconsistency

Distributed Database Incident: Inconsistent Replicas You are on-call for a distributed database that serves production traffic. Dashboards show data i...

System Design
11
0
90 people solved
Sep 6, 2025
Google logo
Google
Hard
Software Engineer

Design quota enforcement for high concurrency

System Design: Quota Enforcement Service at Very High QPS Context You are designing a multi-tenant quota and rate-limiting service used by many backen...

System Design
11
0
115 people solved
Sep 6, 2025
Palo Alto Networks logo
Palo Alto Networks
Hard
Software Engineer

Design streaming difference at scale

Design a Near Real-Time Anti-Join: Stream vs. Large Reference List You are given: - list1: an unbounded, high-throughput event stream of keys (e.g., u...

System Design
14
0
137 people solved
Sep 6, 2025
DoorDash logo
DoorDash
Hard
Software EngineerSenior+

Design consistent hashing for sharding

Design a Consistent-Hashing Router with Replication You are building a stateless router that maps arbitrary keys (for example, request IDs or cache ke...

System Design
19
0
180 people solved
Sep 6, 2025
Amazon logo
Amazon
Hard
Software Engineer

Design secure multi-tier cloud infrastructure

System Design: Multi-tier VPC Architecture for a Large-Scale Application You are designing and deploying a production-ready, multi-tier network on AWS...

System Design
7
0
73 people solved
Sep 6, 2025
Snowflake logo
Snowflake
Hard
Software Engineer

Design cache for DAG-based query views

System Design: Caching Strategy for a DAG of Materialized Views Context You are designing an analytics system that computes materialized query views. ...

System Design
20
0
192 people solved
Sep 6, 2025
Meta logo
Meta
Hard
Software Engineer

Design a real-time messenger

Question Design a real-time messaging system (a Messenger/WhatsApp-style product) that supports 1:1 and group chats. Walk through requirements, the AP...

System Design
8
0
66 people solved
Sep 6, 2025
Meta logo
Meta
Medium
Software Engineer

Design a ticket or hotel reservation system

Design a reservation system (Ticketmaster-style event seats or hotel rooms). Requirements: - Users search availability by date/event. - Users select s...

System Design
2
0
45 people solved
Feb 25, 2026
Axon logo
Axon
Medium
Software Engineer

Design analytical tracking database

Design analytical tracking database Design an Analytical Database for User Actions Context You are building an analytics data store to track user beha...

System Design
24
0
193 people solved
Aug 4, 2025
Duolingo logo
Duolingo
Hard
Software Engineer

Design Animal Chess game classes

Design Animal Chess game classes Design a Simple Animal Chess (Jungle/Dou Shou Qi) Engine Context You are to design and implement a minimal-but-correc...

System Design
6
0
99 people solved
Aug 4, 2025
Bytedance logo
Bytedance
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Design a High-Frequency Job Scheduler

This question evaluates competency in distributed systems design, scheduling semantics (including high-frequency and recurring jobs), durable job stor...

System Design
5
0
43 people solved
Apr 10, 2026
eBay logo
eBay
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Design a Top-K trending service

This question evaluates skills in distributed system design, real-time stream processing, scalable aggregation, windowing semantics, and trade-offs ar...

System Design
6
0
118 people solved
Jan 15, 2026
Assorted Health logo
Assorted Health
Medium
Software Engineer

Design a Conversational Flight Search, Booking, and Price-Tracking Service

Design a Conversational Flight Search, Booking, and Price-Tracking Service Design a service for roughly 30 million daily active users. A user can chat...

System Design
2
0
17 people solved
Jan 14, 2026
Meta logo
Meta
Medium
Software EngineerSenior+

Design Queue And Taxi Matching Services

Answer both independent system design prompts. For each one, clarify requirements, propose APIs, describe core data models, explain the architecture, ...

System Design
2
0
30 people solved
Apr 9, 2026
Google logo
Google
Hard
Software Engineer

Design a prioritized log manager with eviction

Design a prioritized log manager with eviction Design a Log Store with Priority- and Recency-Aware Eviction Context You are designing an in-memory (or...

System Design
7
0
74 people solved
Aug 1, 2025
Amazon logo
Amazon
Hard
Software Engineer

Design ad clickstream analytics pipeline

Design ad clickstream analytics pipeline Design an end-to-end advertising clickstream ingestion and analytics platform that ingests events through Kaf...

System Design
12
0
89 people solved
Jul 31, 2025
Google logo
Google
Medium
Software EngineerSenior+ Locked

Design a large-scale distributed rate limiter

This question evaluates system design competency in distributed systems, focusing on scalability, multi-tenant isolation, rate-limiting algorithms, co...

System Design
15
0
164 people solved
Jan 12, 2026

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