Software Engineer System Design Interview Questions

System design for Software Engineers, drawn from 1,315 reported loops: Meta accounts for 81 of them, OpenAI 69, Amazon 60 and Google 40, with Rippling and Anthropic at 38 each and DoorDash at 35. The briefs have moved with the industry. Beside the durable ones, a fitness tracking app with followers and leaderboards, or a payment-count dashboard that must stay correct as both readers and update rate climb, you now get an LLM observability platform, a scheduler for opaque long-running GPU jobs, and a conversational flight search that books and then tracks price changes. The reasoning asked for stays familiar: where state lives, how you shard it, what you cache and when it goes stale, fan-out on write against fan-out on read, idempotent writes, backpressure, and which failure mode you accept when a queue backs up. A few are not whiteboard exercises at all but code review, reading a getEvents endpoint for readability, performance, scalability and security. This slice skews late and difficult: 559 were asked onsite against 460 in technical screens, and 429 are rated hard, close behind the 599 rated medium. No console applies here, so 1080 of the 1,315 instead carry a written solution to argue with.