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 222 Companies08.11.2026
Showing 20 results
Role
Anthropic logo
Anthropic
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Design a Distributed Rate Limiter

This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design distributed systems with globally consistent state across multiple servers. It tests system de...

System Design
35
0
443 people solved
Jun 23, 2026
Gusto logo
Gusto
Medium
Software Engineer

Scope and Design a Restaurant Scheduling System

Scope and Design a Restaurant Scheduling System The initial prompt is simply “design a restaurant scheduling system.” Begin by distinguishing three pl...

System Design
1
0
12 people solved
Aug 1, 2026
Snowflake logo
Snowflake
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Design an Audit Logs Service

This question evaluates the ability to design a scalable, multi-tenant audit logging system, covering event storage, tamper-evident retention, and eff...

System Design
18
0
214 people solved
Jun 17, 2026
Rippling logo
Rippling
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Prevent Duplicate Payments Under High Load

This system design question tests a candidate's ability to reason about idempotency, distributed consistency, and fault tolerance in high-throughput p...

System Design
66
0
699 people solved
May 30, 2026
Bloomberg logo
Bloomberg
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Design A Real-Time VWAP Analytics Provider

Study a real-time market data system design problem for computing VWAP from high-volume trade ticks across many exchanges. The prompt covers feed hand...

System Design
10
0
175 people solved
Jun 5, 2026
Figma logo
Figma
Medium
Software Engineer

Design Comments for a Collaborative Whiteboard

Design Comments for a Collaborative Whiteboard Design comments for a real-time collaborative whiteboard. The product details below are practice assump...

System Design
13
0
129 people solved
Jul 1, 2026
Uber logo
Uber
Medium
Software EngineerSenior+

Design a Ride-Sharing System (Uber-style Core Platform)

Design a Ride-Sharing System (Uber-style Core Platform) Design the core backend of a ride-sharing platform like Uber. Riders open the app, see nearby ...

System Design
8
0
113 people solved
Jun 28, 2026
Scale AI logo
Scale AI
Easy
Software Engineer AI

Design a Streaming Job Scheduler

Design and incrementally build a streaming job scheduler: a service (and supporting class) that continuously ingests tasks and dispatches them to work...

System Design
217
1
1898 people solved
Apr 9, 2026
OpenAI logo
OpenAI
Hard
Software Engineer Locked

Design a Payment Processing System with Exactly-Once Charging

This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design a payment system that guarantees exactly-once charging under network failures, retries, and du...

System Design
32
0
376 people solved
Jun 26, 2026
NVIDIA logo
NVIDIA
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Design the Control Plane for a Compute Cluster: Host Monitoring + Job Dispatch

This question assesses the ability to design a distributed control plane that tracks live host state across a large compute fleet under high write con...

System Design
16
0
149 people solved
Jun 20, 2026
Zscaler logo
Zscaler
Medium
Software EngineerSenior+

Design Global Metrics Monitoring and Real-Time Alerting

Design Global Metrics Monitoring and Real-Time Alerting Design a large-scale monitoring and alerting system for a global microservice architecture. Th...

System Design
0
0
9 people solved
Jul 30, 2026
OpenAI logo
OpenAI
Medium
Software Engineer

Design Video Generation Orchestration

Design a scalable system to orchestrate AI video generation (think Sora-style text-to-video). Users submit text prompts to generate videos. For each s...

System Design
33
0
462 people solved
Jun 12, 2026
OpenAI logo
OpenAI
Hard
Software Engineer

Design a Fault-Tolerant Video Generation Platform

Design a Fault-Tolerant Video Generation Platform Prompt Design an asynchronous video-generation platform. A user submits generation parameters, check...

System Design
18
0
130 people solved
Jul 5, 2026
Clay logo
Clay
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Design a Usage-Based Credit Tracking System for a SaaS Platform

This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design a distributed metering and billing system that tracks account balances, authorizes consumption...

System Design
11
0
80 people solved
Jun 21, 2026
OpenAI logo
OpenAI
Easy
Software Engineer

Design a sandboxed cloud IDE

System Design: Sandboxed Cloud IDE (Colab-like) Design a multi-tenant, browser-based cloud IDE/notebook that lets users run code inside an isolated sa...

System Design
376
2
7111 people solved
Jan 22, 2026
Amazon logo
Amazon
Medium
Software Engineer

Architect an AI Chatbot for Enterprise Users

Architect an AI chatbot for enterprise users over internal knowledge and tools. `hint Hint 1 Start by stating assumptions, then work from requirements...

System Design
14
0
138 people solved
Jul 1, 2026
Databricks logo
Databricks
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Design a Book Price Aggregator

This question evaluates skills in distributed systems design, fault tolerance, scalability, integration with external services, transactional consiste...

System Design
126
1
1260 people solved
May 6, 2026
Onepay logo
Onepay
Easy
Software Engineer

Design a Discord-Style Communication Platform

Design a Discord-Style Communication Platform Design a communication platform with organizations, channels, direct messages, and real-time text delive...

System Design
3
0
33 people solved
Jul 8, 2026
Google logo
Google
Medium
Software EngineerNew Grad Locked

Match Tagged Problems to Skilled Programmers at Scale

Model tagged problems and skilled programmers as a bipartite matching problem, then extend the design to distributed and streaming workloads. The exer...

System Design
5
0
57 people solved
Jun 17, 2026
Walmart Labs logo
Walmart Labs
Medium
Software Engineer

Design a Metrics Monitoring Dashboard

Design a metrics monitoring platform and dashboard for application and infrastructure time series. Services emit metric name, timestamp, numeric value...

System Design
1
0
7 people solved
Jul 31, 2026

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